to support delivering business solutions and new products,
accelerate speed to market, and enable sales growth—all
while elevating traditional supply chain performance in
terms of talent, service, and cost. The challenge with a supply chain transformation is to accomplish all of these key
items well.
QWhat are some of the human resources aspects to con- sider when introducing change to an organization?
AIt’s a matter first of getting people’s attention, fol- lowed by implementing sound financial controls and
celebrating small wins with your people. I include sound
financial controls because you have to consider this to be a
serious element in a turnaround situation. When you’re in
that kind of situation, there’s money leaking out of the
company. Your job is to get control over that.
When you measure and demonstrate success, it inspires
confidence. Over the long term, it’s ensuring that you have
won the hearts and minds of your partners (employees)
through high levels of engagement. We depend on and
invest in our leaders and our leadership model for our continued success. But we’re also partners. Everyone at every
level is treated equally.
QHow does the logistics organization help to make Starbucks a successful global company?
ABringing new products to market competitively and adjusting to rapidly changing market conditions are
key logistics competencies we continue to improve. Speed
to market is really critical to Starbucks. At any one time,
there are several hundred new products. They may not be
new to you as a consumer, but they are new to logistics. It
could be a new product line or it could simply be a change
in packaging. On a worldwide basis, we have 700 to 800 new
products to manage weekly.
Our “perfect order” metric is embedded in our culture.
The ability to sustain overall high levels of perfect order
performance is core to our purpose and existence. Did the
order arrive at the promised time? Was every line and the
entire quantity filled or not? There is no gray with this. We
fill 135,000 orders a week globally. If an order is not delivered on time because there was a blizzard, then the order
still failed.
Our approach is to think locally in the markets; execute and
operate regionally; and leverage globally. My job is to ensure
we’re leveraging logistics standards and processes—you can
call them best practices—across the global enterprise.
Randy Fowler
AFTER MORE THAN 30 YEARS OF GOVernment service, Randy Fowler recently
became a senior fellow at the Logistics
Management Institute, a not-for-profit
organization dedicated to solving some of
the government’s most complex problems.
He brings an extensive background in
defense logistics to his new position. From
2008 to 2011, Fowler served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for materiel readiness. Before that, he held a series of assignments across the Department of Defense (DOD).
Fowler took the time along the way to focus on improving the profession, with significant career stops at the
Army’s Logistics Management College and the Defense
Acquisition University, where he served as a member of the
DAU’s leadership team from 2001 to 2008. In 2011, Fowler
was inducted into the Defense Acquisition University’s Hall
of Fame.
QHow did you get involved in logistics in the first place?
AStocking groceries at Safeway. It was 1977; the econo- my wasn’t great, and I was waiting to get promoted to
assistant manager. I took a government aptitude test, and
that earned me a visit from a recruiter from what is now the
Army Materiel Command. He asked me if I wanted to be a
logistics intern, pointing out that I already
worked in the retail end of logistics and that
my business school and operations research
academic background all fit the profile of a
logistician. I decided to give DOD logistics a
try. It was a great decision.
