Episode 5:
Developing solutions in the supply chain with Ian Powell

I think it demonstrates people’s aptitude to think and to do stuff, and process information and make decisions. It doesn’t necessarily dictate what direction you’re going to take. I think it just shows you’re competent.

Yeah, but you probably still enjoy it outside of work.

Yeah, I joined Kuehne+Nagel back in 2015, just before the birth of our second child. I went into a solutions role, but solutions sales, working in their 4PL business unit, driving sales, but also, the solutions behind that sales. I was in the 4PL business unit for three years, before moving into solutions consulting for corporate partners. In total, I spent six years with Kuehne+Nagel, in two different roles.

Invariably, it’s just about understanding customers’ challenges, pain points, and issues, and how you can then tailor, essentially, a solution which could include service delivery. It could include technology, physical logistics, and executional logistics services to, essentially, overcome those challenges and problems. I think a day in the life varies quite significantly. There’s a lot of fact finding behind really understanding the customer’s challenges. That fact finding can be workshops, it can be as-is sessions. It could be having strategic alignment sessions with the customer, to understand, essentially, what they want to achieve in their supply chain. And then, it’s really dissecting that back and saying, “What enablers do you need to be able to meet those objectives? What challenges are you having in your current supply chain, and how do we build a solution to overcome all of those things?”.

I think it’s taking all that uncertainty and finding a direction, and putting that into something that, invariably, supports customers to make a decision. That’s the main point, I would say.

I’m not sure if it was by design, at the start. I think it was more just inquisitiveness on my part. I’m always quite inquisitive to understand how customer supply chains operate, what they find to be difficult, challenges, or issues that need to be addressed. I think the interesting bit for me, although each customer’s supply chain is very unique to their own situation, their own circumstance, the product that they sell, or the markets that they serve, I would say, although it’s simple in terms, it’s very different as well. Depending on who you’re speaking to and what the customer wants to achieve. It’s quite varied. No one problem is the same, in many instances. You find common themes and common problems, but invariably, they’re different, depending on the circumstances. All of those things, they get you out of bed. They keep you interested and inquisitive, and interested in asking questions.

I know you’re not someone who loves to talk about yourself and your own strengths, even though you have so many. I’m going to ask this question in a way that I’m going to trick you into trying to tell me your strengths, anyway. If there were anyone who was listening to this podcast, who was thinking about a potential future in the solutions space, what do you think the key skills that they would need to have to really be successful would be?

There’s probably several. I think having an organized mind, and a structured way of thinking, is probably a good starting point. It’s also to be inquisitive, to always ask those questions. I always take the view that there’s no stupid question because everything’s relevant in context. I think, to just be inquisitive, to have a structured mind, and a structured approach to the way of working. Equally, if you like change, and you like having a different work environment every day, you like experiencing or talking to different customers, those are some of the strengths. I would say that you need to fall into solutions. Just try different things. You try different things, I’m sure you’ll find the thing that really inspires you, and motivates you to get out bed.

There’s two I can think of immediately, and one during my time in Volvo. There’s many I can think of, but one during my time in Volvo was I spent nearly four years in India. At that time, Volvo set up a joint venture with Isha. One of the projects within that joint venture was to start a new medium-duty application engine plant in Pithampur, India. That was a Greenfield type, so it was a whole new production facility. It was, essentially, producing medium-duty application engines for the Asia market, but also producing what we call the base engine for the European market. It was sending the base engine into Lyon, France, for final assembly, whilst also providing finished engines to different Volvo plants and Eicher plants around the Asia region.

Yeah. Satisfying, but also it was a bittersweet moment as well. You spent so much of your kind of life dedicated to this in four years and then projects delivered and you move onto something else. Right? So you miss that maturity phase as everything starts to fall into place, the production is running at full capacity. You miss all of those, you miss all of those milestones, right? Cause you’re only there for the initial delivery and getting things started and going. It’s always good to keep in touch with those people and just understand where things are and how they’re lying. I’ve worked with loads of great people who have also excelled in their career as well past that, so it’s quite interesting to keep in touch with, with those people as well.

Yeah, we had good times. We also had late days and late nights. When I first started, we worked six days a week. Culturally in India, they work Monday to Saturday, so finished at like two o’clock on a Saturday, but that changed around a year in moving to standard working days. But yeah, it was definitely a life experience, probably wouldn’t change it for anything.

Yeah. My role initially was on presales, right? So supporting the BDMs, the BDS to drive business development managers and business development directors to drive solutions for customers or prospective customers. It’s end cargo a lot of our values driven through the platform. Certainly some of the benefits that we drive through the platform is obviously efficiency, optimization at resources.

I wonder, if you were to think about all the different customer conversations that you have and the problems that our customers tend to be facing and the way that you tend to address those problems. Are there any common threads that you see coming up again?

If we look at it on the kind of macro level, right? It is about visibility more often than that, it’s about getting more insights to what’s happening in your supply chain. I think historically it’s been very much customers are raising purchase orders to either their suppliers, their manufacturers, and then there’s this black hole of sorts.

Let’s talk a little bit about disruption. One of the things we talk about a lot on this podcast is that our speakers tend to all share the recognition that the supply chain space not only has experienced massive change in the last few years. The pandemic breaks it for us locally in the UK, it has in many ways accelerated change that was possibly coming.

I think the last couple of years there’s been a lot of force change, right? Because of the circumstances you’ve kind of described there. I think for me, where I’d like to see disruption, right, is about having the possibility or the capability to see kind of your supply chain across multiple functions of the business.

I hope you’re ready for our quickfire question round.

I believe I am.

Apple and I’d probably like to work in their sourcing department for a day just to understand. They produce awesome products, right? It’s just to understand how they coordinate all of that from a tech perspective as well.

For me, agile. Resilient assumes that you manage your crisis, and then you revert back to pre-crisis state. I think the reality of supply chain now is we will never get back to any status quo, so agility’s best for me.

Love that. Final question, can you give us three words to describe the current market of supply chain right now?

Well, I’ll allow you that. We’ll forgive you.

Not at all. Thank you to our fantastic audience for tuning into this episode. If anyone has any questions or feedback, please do feel free to contact us on LinkedIn. We would love to hear from you, but for now, goodbye.