I recently attended the CSCMP EDGE conference in Nashville. Toy manufacturer Mattel’s Chief supply Chain Officer, Roberto Isaias, gave the keynote address.
This Wall Street Journal article by Liz Young summarizes of the speech and Mattel’s supply chain.
Isaias spent 12 years at CPG giant Procter and Gamble before moving to Mattel in 2002. Many of the lessons he shared in the speech will be familiar to those with manufacturing experience:
- Tradeoffs between long production runs and fewer changeovers at P&G to shorter runs, more changeovers, and shorter lead times at Mattel
- Comparing Asian manufacturing in Asia to nearshoring in Mexico, with their tradeoffs in lead times and cost structures. At times, Mattel utilizes a hybrid approach: employing Mexican manufacturing to enable faster time to market, followed by larger scale Asian manufacturing with a lower cost structure
- SKU rationalization of the long tail to reduce manufacturing complexity
- Managing demand variability due to entertainment / movie tie-ins: moving to 50/50 owned/contract manufacturing capacity helps smooth out the fixed + variable cost structure for consistent unit costs
Isaias also shared his five key lessons for leading change. These struck me not only as good, commonsense leadership advice, but for their parallels to the military leadership traits I learned while serving in the United States Marine Corps.
- The business is the boss
- Don’t delegate complexity – “I believe my role is to solve the most complex and complicated problems we have”
- Take bad news well – “the only way to know what is happening in your organization is to be open to bad news”
- Be fair and take care of people
- Lead the execution – “don’t ask people to do things you wouldn’t do”
Overall this was a great keynote and example for effective supply chain leadership. I highly recommend you consider attending CSCMP EDGE next year. If you’re interested in learning how our team helped a CPG manufacturer increase throughput from a capacity-constrained plant, read our case study.
Best Regards
Ralph Asher
Founder, Data Driven Supply Chain LLC