January 12, 2022
23 min Listen
In this episode of Masters of Digital Transformation, Tony Saldanha hosts Katherine Ross, former President of Health Care Services and SVP of Worldwide Customer and Logistics Services at Johnson & Johnson. Katherine’s 35-year career in supply chain and operations leadership spans all supply chain functions in the healthcare and CPG industries and includes time at Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, and McKinsey.
Her varied roles and leadership experience have given her a unique perspective on connecting the dots across the supply chain as well as building diverse global teams.
Key Takeaways
There is always ROI in building a resilient supply chain
Allocating investment towards developing a resilient supply chain creates significant long term value. It may be tempting to make tradeoffs that prioritize boosting cost performance over building a robust, responsive supply chain, but when a crisis happens this decision could put a company at a competitive disadvantage. Being proactive about building stronger customer and supplier relationships, as well as investing in technology, infrastructure, and targeted inventory will help a company better handle demand and supply shocks because they have an extended network that can be leveraged to navigate through volatility.
Focus on developing leaders who can connect the dots
Today’s leadership needs to develop a digital mindset that spans the enterprise, rather than focusing on just their individual function. Digitization can help uncover the gaps between silos and leaders need to connect the dots across those silos to optimize strategy, planning and processes across the organization. Equally important are communications, development, and reward systems that help create future leaders that understand how their responsibilities impact the success of the overall enterprise.
Take on stretch roles
Katherine has had opportunities to lead global teams in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. She considers it a career highlight to build and lead diverse, global teams with different skill sets and find successful ways to work together to achieve results. She advises new managers to focus on their ability to learn, because it allows leaders to move into new situations, rapidly assess and create potential for successful results.
About the authors
o9
The Digital Brain Platform
o9 Solutions is a leading Enterprise Knowledge and AI-powered platform helping companies build Agile, Adaptive & Autonomous Planning & Execution Models for transforming enterprise decision-making in environments of rising volatility and uncertainty. Whether it is improving forecast accuracy, matching demand and supply and driving collaboration across the multi-tier supply chain to improve resilience at optimal costs and inventory, or optimizing new product and commercial initiatives to drive revenue growth and margins, decision-making processes from long-range to tactical to execution horizon can be made faster and smarter and connected on o9’s Digital Brain Platform.
o9 brings together game-changing technology innovations — such as innovative enterprise knowledge graph modeling, big data analytics, advanced algorithms for forecasting, demand/supply balancing, scenario planning, real time learning, collaboration, generative and agentic AI, easy-to-use interfaces and cloud-based delivery, and innovative management methods — as well as organization, process and change management best practices to transform decision-making speed and intelligence.
