Operations Control-Tower Decoupling Leader — Food Ingredients

The mandate

The carve-out owns factories and customer contracts at legal close but relies on the seller’s planning hub to reconcile demand, allocate constrained ingredients, adjudicate customer priority and coordinate disruptions. Transition services describe reports and systems, not the judgement behind cross-site trades. The designated buyer-side leader withdrew before close, leaving no executive accountable for building independent command before seller support expires.

The interim joins within ten days for thirteen months, spanning legal close, standalone planning design, three seasonal cycles, four command simulations, TSA exit and permanent operations leader onboarding. A forecast shock, allergen restriction, raw-material loss, site outage, logistics event or priority dispute becomes a controlled separation decision. The final eight weeks are reserved for successor command and seller-independent proof.

Handover requires standalone data, demand and capacity cadence, allocation principles, decision rights, event thresholds, customer escalation, master-data controls, manual fallback, planning measures and reconciled TSA exit. The permanent appointee must manage an unseen dual-site outage during seasonal demand without seller analysts, recreate critical calculations from owned data and explain every customer trade to the executive committee.

The leader may set allocation inside board-approved principles, activate approved contingencies, reject unsupported seller decisions, reprioritise sites, replace transition leads and deploy £74 million of authorised separation investment. Quality retains allergen and product-release authority; Commercial owns price and customer commitments; the seller operates contracted services until exit. Major customer breach and TSA termination outside agreed gates require committee approval.

Product formulation, transaction valuation, long-term network strategy, collective consultation, ERP replacement, customer pricing and seller contract litigation are excluded. The interim cannot use an allergen exception to protect service, conceal separation cost in inventory, copy seller-confidential data beyond entitlement or declare independence while any critical decision still relies on an unnamed seller expert.

Why this seat is open

The planned buyer-side executive withdrew shortly before legal close, exposing that systems transfer had been mistaken for operational independence. Temporary leadership must build and prove a standalone exception-command capability before seller services expire, while recruiting a permanent operations executive to own the new company’s planning discipline.

What you will own

• Identify every seller-dependent forecast, capacity, material, allocation, logistics, customer and exception decision.
• Establish standalone cadence, owned data, authority, escalation and economic consequence for normal and disrupted operations.
• Convert undocumented seller judgement into entitled logic, client-owned evidence and rehearsable decision playbooks.
• Govern TSA service performance, buyer readiness, fallback, knowledge transfer, exit tests and residual dependency.
• Direct allocation and contingency choices within approved customer, quality, working-capital and margin principles.
• Lead four simulations involving ingredient loss, allergen restriction, site outage, forecast shock and seller unavailability.
• Transfer command after the successor resolves a seasonal dual-site disruption entirely from standalone capability.

Candidate qualifications

• Held integrated planning or operations command during food, chemicals or consumer-products carve-outs.
• Separated critical control-tower decisions whose logic, data and expert judgement remained embedded with a seller.
• Balanced constrained allocation across service, margin, quality, working capital and contractual customer consequence.
• Built manual fallbacks and TSA exits that proved independence during realistic multi-site disruption.
• Preserved distinct Quality, Commercial, seller and separation-committee boundaries while exercising buyer-side operating authority.
• Handed command to permanent leadership through seasonal operations and a seller-unavailability simulation.

Non-negotiables

• Available within ten days for London leadership, ten residencies and four independent command simulations.
• Direct operational carve-out command is required; technology separation or TSA tracking alone is insufficient.
• Will disclose ingredient suppliers, food manufacturers, buyers, sellers, logistics providers and transaction advisers.
• Will not alter formulation, price customers, litigate TSAs, bypass allergen controls or use seller data without entitlement.

1. 49 words maximum. Describe an operating decision whose hidden seller dependency survived legal close.
2. 49 words maximum. How did you prove a separated control tower could withstand expert unavailability?
3. 49 words maximum. Confirm London availability and the most complex carve-out allocation you commanded.