DC Velocity - July 2016

34 DC VELOCITY JULY 2016 www.dcvelocity.com t h ou g ht l e a de rs

Josué Muñoz came to logistics indirectly, by way of information technology and then customer development. Nearly 25 years ago, armed with a degree in computer and systems engineering, he began working as IT director at a Colgate-Palmolive Co. subsidiary in Colombia.

He then moved into customer development at the subsidiary. Within a few years, he was vice president of customer development for Europe and the South Pacific; in 2008, he was named general manager for the Caribbean region.

Since 2010, Muñoz has served as vice president, global customer service and logistics, for Colgate-Palmolive. In that position, he has headed up a companywide initiative called “Synchronize Demand and Supply - Increasing Supply Chain Flexibility, Reliability and Responsiveness” and overseen the implementation of shared service centers for core supply chain processes.

According to his nominators at the University of Tennessee, Muñoz “has been an extremely valued member of the University of Tennessee’s Global Supply Chain Institute Advisory Board, where he has provided significant direction as our program has risen into … several different Top 5 rankings lists.”

Q You moved from IT to customer development. Was that a big adjustment? Are there areas of commonality between the job functions?

A When I take a new role, I first give myself 60 days to listen, observe, and learn from the team. The perspective from outside an area can be very different from the reality once on the inside. So it is better to make sure to understand the complexities of the new area before taking action.

The customer development area is responsible for delivering results every week, month, and quarter. If the sales are not delivered, the organization is put under significant stress. So while there is pressure to deliver results in both IT and customer development (CD), the pace is different.

What is common between IT and CD is the focus on bringing value to the customer. In IT, it’s an internal customer; looking at how technology and process together can bring value to the organization. In CD, it’s the external customer, in our case retailers, distributors, and wholesalers; developing plans to drive category growth and market-share growth both for them and for Colgate.

Q How did the initiative to synchronize demand, and your involvement in it, come about? What were
the main objectives of that initiative, and the biggest
challenges?

A When I joined the supply chain six years ago, coming from the commercial area, I was given the task of making the supply chain and our commercial areas [marketing and customer develop-ment] work as one. That objective drove the company’s Synchronize Demand and Supply Initiative. In today’s volatile world, our supply chain not only needed to be the best in delivering lower cost, but also had to be agile. We had to make sure our supply chain was focused on our customer. We had to get closer to the shelf, and we had to have the people, processes, and systems in place to be able to respond faster to demand changes without increasing cost.

The team focused on a few sets of KPIs [key performance indicators] that we believed drove synchronization. First was on-shelf availability, which aligns us with our customer’s objective and requires that we look at our customer’s supply chain and ours as one. Another was leadtime—how do we reduce the time that our plants need to be able to react to demand fluctuations by improving our cycle times, reducing change over time, and reducing minimum run sizes? And finally inventory. Inventory under control is the result of a system that is working in sync.

Our biggest challenge has been technology. We had to ensure that all our processes are run 100 percent within our system and that the system provides us with this end-to-end visibility of the supply chain. Fortunately, we have in SAP a partner that is working with us in co-de-veloping the solutions that are providing the end-to-end visibility, and our teams globally are driving full utilization of our systems in all our supply chain processes.

Q You have overseen the implementation of shared service centers for core supply chain processes. Can you explain what that’s about—who is sharing the service centers and what benefits it brings?

A As part of a Colgate restructuring, started three years ago, we [expanded] Colgate Business Services [which had started in Europe in 2008, providing financial services in that region]. Today, Colgate Business Services provides services in finance, analytics, and supply chain. It is expanding to other areas.

We leveraged the concept and the structure to centralize order-to-invoice, supply network planning, logistics management [processes] …, using the structure and concept of a shared business center to create new processes at the center to drive agility and efficiency.