EVP – Risk and Resilience — Fulfilment And Customer-Care System

The mandate

The enterprise is preparing to extend several retail formats into new markets, each with a different fulfilment and service model. Some rely on central distribution, others on local picking, partner delivery or cross-border stock. Customer care may be internal, outsourced or shared across markets. Expansion cases describe commercial upside and launch milestones, but they do not consistently show how the customer promise will survive an outage, partner failure, customs interruption, product issue or sudden demand event.

The EVP – Risk and Resilience will establish that operating assurance. The remit covers enterprise resilience, business continuity, crisis management, critical third-party risk, expansion-readiness assurance and coordination of major fulfilment and customer-service risks. Operations owns day-to-day performance, technology and security teams control their domains, and quality or legal leaders retain relevant authority. The EVP must connect those owners around essential services and ensure residual exposure is accepted before a market opens.

This planned replacement is not intended to create a central approval gate for every launch. The board wants proportional readiness standards, credible recovery and rapid escalation where dependence is high. The executive must distinguish a risk that can be tested during controlled operation from one that makes the customer or regulatory promise unsafe at launch.

Scope and operating context

Based onsite in Dubai, the EVP will influence approximately 1,825 employees and material partners across the United Arab Emirates and a wider international region. The operating ecosystem includes distribution sites, local fulfilment, delivery coordination, customer-care centres, technology services, product suppliers, carriers, BPOs and facilities partners. A focused central team will work through risk and continuity owners embedded in markets and functions.

Retail formats create different essential services. A convenience proposition may depend on rapid local replenishment and immediate substitutions; a large-format store may require stable site systems and product-safety response; a cross-border digital offer depends on customs, payments and remote care. The resilience model must follow the actual customer promise rather than apply a single recovery time to the enterprise.

Partner concentration is often unavoidable in a new market. A carrier may have unique access, a BPO may provide local language at scale, or a technology service may be embedded in the launch architecture. The EVP will determine whether dual sourcing, recoverability, contractual remedy, manual fallback or conscious acceptance offers the best response. Recording concentration without an operational option is not enough.

First-year agenda

The first one hundred days will map essential fulfilment and care services for the approved expansion pipeline. For each format and market, the EVP will identify accountable executives, dependencies, recovery expectations, data and product obligations, tested controls and customer consequences. Current launch gates will be examined to see whether resilience evidence arrives early enough to change design or only after commitments are fixed.

The executive will then introduce a readiness standard scaled to consequence. It will cover demand and capacity scenarios, site and technology recovery, inventory visibility, partner continuity, customer communication, refunds and remedy, product withdrawal, data access and executive command. Evidence requirements should be practical: tested procedures, named alternates, known limitations and agreed decision authority.

Several compound exercises will test the standard. A scenario might combine launch demand with a payment outage, close a fulfilment site while customer care is overloaded, interrupt a cross-border lane during a product concern or remove a critical delivery partner. Exercises must use realistic data and operating teams, not tabletop reassurance. Findings will receive funded actions, launch conditions or explicit acceptance by the executive with authority.

Third-party governance will be segmented by essential service and tolerable interruption. Contracts, service reporting, technical recovery, financial viability, workforce continuity and transition feasibility will be assessed accordingly. The EVP will ensure procurement decisions show the resilience cost of lowest-price concentration and that partners participate in relevant tests before scale.

Crisis capability will be adapted for new markets. Local leaders need clear activation criteria, authority, contact and communication paths; central teams need enough visibility to coordinate without taking over every event. Customer care should receive verified facts, appropriate remedy authority and updates at the speed of the incident. By year-end, readiness evidence should inform expansion sequencing and several critical weaknesses should have been removed or consciously bounded.

Leadership responsibilities

The EVP will chair the resilience forum and report material launch or operating exposure to executive and board oversight. Papers will state the service at risk, evidence quality, customer and financial consequence, available responses and decision owner. The executive will avoid technical risk language that obscures the practical choice.

During serious disruption, the role maintains the enterprise command system: activation, verified facts, decision log, stakeholder coordination, customer consequence and transition back to normal ownership. Functional specialists remain authoritative in their fields. The EVP ensures their actions do not conflict and that emerging information changes the response.

The central team will build capability rather than own every plan. Market and functional leaders should understand their essential services, early warnings and fallback obligations. Assurance will test whether arrangements work, with repeated failure addressed through design, leadership or investment rather than additional documentation.

Measures of success

The board will review expansion decisions supported by completed resilience evidence, critical dependencies with tested recovery, exercise findings, overdue high-consequence actions, incident activation and actual recovery. Customer measures include cancelled orders, contact surge, refund and remedy, communication timeliness and repeat impact after disruption.

Third-party progress will include assurance coverage by criticality, participation in tests, concentration decisions and transition readiness. The quality of risk acceptance will be monitored through named ownership and funded contingency. A launch completed on date but dependent on untested manual work will not be regarded as resilient.

Candidate profile

Candidates should bring 22–28 years of risk, resilience, operations or crisis leadership in retail, e-commerce, logistics, customer service, payments or another multi-site service environment. They must have supported international expansion and led responses in which physical fulfilment, technology and customer communication failed together.

The board will seek examples of delaying, conditioning or redesigning a launch because recovery evidence was inadequate, governing a concentrated partner that could not be replaced quickly, and learning from a realistic compound exercise. Candidates should understand business continuity at service level, not only facility or system recovery.

The successful executive will be independent, calm and proportionate. They must challenge an ambitious market leader without defaulting to prohibition, communicate uncertainty clearly to the board and work effectively with front-line specialists during incidents. Experience across diverse regulatory and partner environments is preferred.

Compensation and appointment terms

The anticipated base range is AED 1,600,000–2,200,000, with annual incentive and long-term participation aligned to durable expansion and enterprise outcomes. Final placement will reflect comparable operational exposure, crisis leadership and current arrangements. Mobility support or treatment of forfeited remuneration will be considered through a documented individual process.

Confidentiality

The enterprise is unnamed because launch markets, partner dependencies and recovery gaps are not public. Shortlisted candidates will receive detailed format and resilience information after identity, conflict and confidentiality checks. Applications must not include security weaknesses, crisis records, partner plans or identifiable customer incidents from another organisation.