You have been working in Amer Sports as the Chief Development Officer since end of 2009. What have you been doing?
In the beginning I together with my colleagues focused on forming our new group strategy with our President and CEO. Since then, it has been very much execution and follow-up of that strategy, particularly through steering processes and programs in the group. We renewed our management processes and have many development programs and new unit/team set-ups in the group that have kept me busy. I also keep taps on opportunities regarding our portfolio strategy and M&A, although so far our focus has been on internal development.
In June, you assumed on top of your existing duties also leadership of Group Supply Chain and Global IT platform. What supply chain management encompasses?
Basically it is all about efficient flow of products and information, from end-to-end: from R&D to sourcing and manufacturing, to logistics and distribution to customers. In the Amer Sports platform we cover Supply Chain Management, Global IT, Manufacturing and Sourcing practice, including the Asian Sourcing Office, Distribution & Transport, the Idea-to-Product process as well as strategic coordination of resources such as the Project Management Office (PMO).
How big is Amer Sports’ supply chain and IT organization?
We are a bit under one thousand people in the direct line organization of Supply Chain & IT / Global Operations and with the whole Amer Sports’ matrix organization (i.e. with the dotted line reporting included) almost half of Amer Sports’ over 7,000 employees work in this area. So it is a fairly sizable operation in five continents that never sleeps.
How would you describe the present level of Amer Sports’ supply chain?
There has been great progress in recent years and the whole Amer Sports wide operation around the physical flow of goods and information is a machine with a built-in drive for continuous improvement. Our systems and processes have improved significantly. With many successful SAP rollout waves already behind us, our Global SAP coverage is already over 85% of our business. But we are of course never satisfied and want to continue improving all aspects of our business and processes.
What are your main tasks in 2012? What is the main focus? And why?
We continue the good development that is in motion in all areas of our Supply Chain & IT / Global Operations. But one thing I would separately highlight here is that we keep reducing complexity in our business. If we don’t actively manage the underlying complexity, we may always be just catching up with our systems and processes as complexity increases.
What do you mean with complexity and why is complexity reduction important?
Typically the heart of the issue is product offering complexity: how many SKU’s (Stock Keeping Units) the company has. The bigger the number, the more this complexity “radiates” additional costs to manufacturing, sourcing, logistics, R&D, customer service and sales. This is not to be misunderstood – adding new product lines and e.g. “surrounding” our consumers with a wider product offering is part of our strategy and I call that growth or “good complexity” if you will. But what we don’t want is too many SKU’s in the same product line targeting the same consumer segment. These SKU’s will only add costs but don’t bring additional profits, probably not even sales and in the worst case also confuse our consumers when they make choices.
What needs to be done to reduce complexity?
We need to act on this on two separate time horizons: in the short term we will keep our inventories “clean” and flush out unproductive SKU’s. For the longer term and more importantly, we need to work end-to-end across our group. Clear consumer driven criteria need to be passed to the R&D before a new SKU is to be created. This will ensure that further “clean-out” programs are unnecessary in the future.
(Text by Amer Sports)
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