John Salt is a car guy—one who’s wanted
to work in materials management and
logistics since the age of 12, when he
toured the Ford Motor Co. complex in
Dearborn, Mich., and was awed by the
1970s-era Mustangs and Cougars that
came rolling off the assembly line. Today,
Salt is senior vice president for supply chain at Canadian Tire Corp. Ltd.,
a Toronto-based general retailer with
approximately 1,700 retail and gasoline outlets across
Canada.
Since stepping into his current role in 2009, he has
helped upgrade the company’s logistics and transportation systems by implementing new technology such
as automated guided vehicles (AGVs), voice picking,
and new warehouse management and transportation
management systems. His current focus is developing
an online fulfillment network to support growth in the
e-commerce channel. He was previously Canadian Tire’s
vice president of distribution, operations planning, and
express auto parts, following a career in the consulting
and manufacturing industries. Salt holds an M.B.A.
from York University in Toronto and a bachelor of technology degree in industrial engineering from Ryerson
Polytechnical Institute (also in Toronto).
Q What’s your proudest professional achievement, and why?
A My proudest moment as a supply chain leader has been to watch the success of the people I’ve coached
and mentored over the years, as they improved the
systems that support our supply chain operations and
the processes and technology we use in our distribution
centers. I’d rather work with our employees and help
them take those little kernels of ideas and turn them into
meaningful changes than to simply say “Thanks very
much, I’ll take it from here.”
Q What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen during your career?
A The biggest change has been the rapid pace of technology, and how much
computing horsepower has increased. I
started at Canadian Tire in 1999, so we
didn’t have iPhones or BlackBerrys, and
the Internet wasn’t broadly available. In
2000, we started a program working with
one of our third-party logistics service
providers (3PLs) to allow online booking
of offshore shipments with some of our
partners in China. It replaced someone picking up a
phone and calling someone else in a shipping office.
Nowadays, you’d say it was no big deal, but it took a lot
of heavy lifting and work to train them to use it. The
power that computers can put in people’s hands is just
huge.
Q What hasn’t changed?
A Very early in my career, just a year or two out of school, someone handed me a book. They said,
“It’s a little dry, but you’ll get a lot out of it.” That
book was Production and Inventory Management in the
Computer Age by Oliver Wight. The fundamental tenets
of materials management, material requirements planning (MRP), and distribution requirements planning
(DRP) were all in there. Today, the speed and power
with which you can play with them has changed, but
those foundational bits haven’t changed at all.
Q What rules do companies need to break?
A The notion that there’s always one best solution to a problem. These young graduates go through engi-
neering programs, and the theme is that there is always
one solution that’s better than the rest. But you get into
the real world and you realize there are many answers,
and sure, some of them are better than others, but over
time, you need to settle on the answer that works best
with the people and the organization you’ve got. We had
our company’s 2016 annual general meeting in May, and
John Salt
such mega-global challenges as environmental sustain-
ability, health, and hunger is that all are, at least in part,
essentially big engineering challenges. Sustainability, for
instance, is all about minimizing material waste, energy
inefficiency, and harmful byproducts. Supply chain is
the function that cuts the steel, dispatches the trucks, and
runs the factories feeding our industrial and consumer
economies. As we work to streamline our operations,
we simultaneously build a closed-loop system that can
and should sustainably meet human needs while assur-
ing availability of resources for the future. Examples
include Ikea’s move to Better Cotton Initiative-certified
cotton, Coca-Cola’s watershed management efforts, and
Unilever’s Zero Waste to Landfill project. All achieved
100 percent success ahead of schedule.
