Richard Lloyd

To understand what brought about this book, and to present my credentials I need to take you back to the late eighties. Like many young men, I spent my late teens and early twenties seeking for a purpose in life. I studied ancient and medieval history, Spanish and Arabic. I wrote plays, founded a theatre company and toured Spain. I travelled and worked in the Middle East and North Africa. I was trying to find way to have an impact on the world, to get some traction. It was while working on a development project in Egypt that a colleague mentioned that logistics knowledge was much in demand.

This resonated, a transferable skill, practical, tangible. Applicable in all spheres: From boosting the economy, to saving the planet, to disaster relief. In 1994, full of vim and verve, I joined Cranfield University to study for an MSc in Logistics and Transportation. We learnt about many things, strategy, planning manufacturing, modelling, warehousing, fleet management and finance. But the key moment for me was Professor Martin Christopher’s lecture. His theme was around “Supply chains compete, not companies”. A grand idea: a philosophy even. It was a great moment. I still believe strongly in the potential that end-to-end supply chain offers. Over the years this has fuelled my frustration when progress is slow. It also gets me up in the morning.

Interning at Lever Europe, I got my first taste of multinational life, looking at inbound logistics. Modelling provided many scenarios for changing the approach. But talking to buyers and suppliers complicated the picture. There was a commercial relationship to be managed. The mathematical optimum could not be implemented easily due to much wider issues. It began to come clear that while there might be a theoretical logistical optimum, getting there was going to be a complicated process. The plot thickened. I went on to work on projects with Unilever companies in Latin America for four years. I then joined i2 technologies in 2000 on the leading edge of supply chain planning.

With i2 I worked on global supply chain planning at Continental tires, in forecasting and replenishment planning in Caprabo in Barcelona and Transportation optimisation with Carrefour in Madrid. Then spent four years leading a large team of consultants in Nokia. We implemented the backbone of demand supply balancing, transportation optimisation, and a whole host of other i2 applications. I went on to run the consulting practice for i2 in EMEA until it became JDA.

The i2 days have often been called a “wild ride”. Quite apart from the fluctuating fortunes of the company, when I joined, most of the projects were in trouble due to software glitches. By 2005 many projects were still struggling, but the issues were now more around organizational change and acceptance of the solutions. In 2006, at the yearly internal i2 kick-off Sanjiv Sidhu said, “We need to be change doers”. This was another key moment for me.

Yet it was hard to know where to begin. I had experiences of facing up to executives and challenging them about their organizations. As a project manager I often had “issues with stakeholder engagement” which really means I had got close to grabbing people by their lapels. These conversations had not been productive. Like many of my colleagues, while I wanted to be a change doer, I felt that I lacked the skills or knowledge. So when I left i2 when it became JDA in 2009, I decided to look into the area further. I researched into organizational behaviour and theories about change.

I spent a year studying “Consulting and Coaching for Change.” at Oxford Said Business School and HEC Paris. We looked at change models and explored a range of related subjects. Change theorists had little to say about the supply chain, and I found little about changing operations across a series or network of organizations. This seemed like a neglected area.

At the same time I got involved in the world of global health supply chains. From 2011 to 2014, I worked on a series of projects with Ministries of health and international agencies in Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Mali and DRC. While looking at ways to improve in-country supply chains, I was struck by how poorly the planning was organised between the local organisations and the global organisations that sought to help them. The organisations largely based in Geneva and Washington saw the problem as starting at the ports of entry: Freetown, Maputo, Bamako, and Kinshasa. Efforts were focussed on strengthening in-country supply chains.

Yet the supply of essential medicines from the global organisations that shipped to these ports was intermittent. Shipments were made typically only once or twice a year, and often arrived unannounced, in huge unmanageable quantities and without the correct documentation. There was little recognition of the poor collaboration across the extended supply chain, most of which begins in Europe and America.

This weak service from suppliers is a major contributing factor to the very low availability of even the most basic medicines in clinics across all the countries I visited. Seeing the situation and the effect that a misunderstanding of the problem, and a failure to achieve an end-to-end supply chain is having on some of the least advantaged people in the world, makes me want to shout this from the rooftops.

Since then I have been involved in several major transformation programs in global manufacturing organisations. To be frank, none of them have been very successful. The challenges they faced varied but had one common element: the human factor. My attempts to address the organizational issues were pretty ineffective. I generally arrived after the programs had started and I was frustrated by deeply entrenched mindsets about how programs should be shaped, and wished that I could have influenced the direction of the interventions from the start.

The supply chain community lacks mental models and concepts for talking about change. The problem is generally treated as an economic and technical challenge rather than a social or human one. Each project, or initiative is a saga in its own right and when I meet with other supply chain people at conferences, discussion soon moves from technical issues to personalities, culture and history. Patterns do emerge and though many of the same problems crop up frequently, generally discussions end with a shrug, and a sigh: “It’s the emperors new clothes, but no one is going to call it”.

Which is what this book is aiming at. I am calling it! It is time to make a noise. I cannot stand by and see more projects fail. More careers ruined. Money wasted, nights spent slaving over impossible timelines with inappropriate concepts. Sapping the productivity of companies, creating uncertainty in the employees. Keeping people at work when they should be at home with their families or out doing whatever they want with their evenings. The supply chain improvement world fails too often and we are not delivering the value we could. What I saw in Africa makes me feel that this is very urgent indeed.

There are great global problems to be addressed. Having found what I thought was a useful niche to try to make a difference. I have spent 25 years grappling with supply chain management. I have been much less successful than I expecting in fixing the world, perhaps I have learnt some humility. Above all I urge caution. Christopher Hitchens says, it is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them like the waste product of a failed experiment.

This book is a chance for me to reflect on what has happened and to try to pass on some of my hard learned lessons and share the ideas of thinkers that have helped me to understand my failures.

If I bring up something that makes sense, that is a start. If I provoke discussion, that will be better. If out of this, some concepts start to be used, and some new insights are reached, then I will have achieved my objective.

Copyright Richard Lloyd reproduced with permission of Kogan Page