ECR AP - GS1 Hong Kong Supply Chain Management

Chris: Back to talent development. What do you think it is best
practice What should companies do to attract the best talent and
help them grow in this fast growing market
Harish Manwani: I am sure there are many best practices in companies.
From our point of view:
1. Recruiting talent: we take 800
management trainees each year and
most of them are in emerging markets
now. We believe that building
local talents is critical. Also you have
to understand the 80% of the population
is here so there are a lot of talented
people
2. Making sure that you train people
a. send them to training etc. b. you
have to leverage the power of our
presence in 170 markets.
The good news is that 90% of our employees are local, but large
numbers of them have worked outside.
3. We have to change the way we look at talent: Earlier, multinational
said Think Global Act Local. It has to change. I do not
want people sitting in China thinking global. I want them to think
local. Consumers in China won’t say that I am a global consumer.
So you have to THINK LOCAL and at the same time ACT GLOB-
AL. It is very important to build talent with local insight. The balance
between local and global is absolutely critical. Building local
insight and thinking local is critical. In India when you join as a
management trainee from anywhere from the world you spend 2
months living in a village, actually working on community projects
in villages. Once trainees do it they love it. This is how you keep in
touch. You cannot become a marketer unless you sell soap in the
villages. This is a value system that makes good successful businesses
and builds talent.
Chris: I don’t think Harish knows this, but I started my career as
Unilever Management trainee! How about you Scott How do you
attract and retain talent
Scott Price: I did not actually start as Unilever Trainee but as Coca-
Cola trainee! The demographics of workforce and the demand dynamics
has changed dramatically. You used to have time to develop
people before they were tasked with financially huge brands. With
the speed that the multinationals came to Asia they all built multibillion
businesses. But the education processes was not able to keep
up. We are all struggling and there is a race for talent. The demographics
also change dramatically. You have markets where the
aging of the population is significant. You have markets where females
are not allowed to engage in the workforce. In Walmart we
try to address these gaps. We have training programs for females.
But the net at the end is eventually you need a more locally empowered
talent pool. 99% of our employees are local but we have higher
turnover rate. So we try to figure out programs to more engage talent
in long terms careers. I think it will take 20 years until the
education and the experience curve caches up with the demand.
Chris Cave Jones Scott Price Harish Manwani
Audience question (Ivett Nagy): I am very frustrated as a shopper
when I do not find my product on the shelf. I know from ECR that
you spend a lot of money on supply chain and somehow it still does
not work properly. What are you going to do about it
Scott Price: Oops! In fact I met several suppliers on this topic yesterday.
I feel for them. It is not easy.
Glenn Jordan: Vice Versa
Harish Manwani: I think it is such as
important point. We talk about strategy,
but execution is strategy in our
business. If you cannot deliver the
right product to the right shelf in the
right channel every day you won’t
win. I am sure everybody in our business
understands that our P/L is determined
by the last mile of our business.
I really believe that the work
we do with partners to try to connect our supply chain is helping us
doing this. I do not say that it is perfect. If it was than we would not
have a job. This is an on-going thing. Expectation from service level
is rising and honestly it is good for our businesses to have higher
and higher expectations.
Glenn Jordan: It has to be on the top of our agenda. It is an issue of
capabilities, an issue of dislocation between the speed we are growing
and the speed we build capabilities and it is a good reminder
that we have to work collaboratively. It has to be at the top of our
agenda.
Seah Kian Peng: We still have to make sure that we do our basics
better. Going back to Human Capital: It is key in everything. I
would like to touch this point: we see that people join a workplace
for a variety of reasons: remuneration, career aspects are important
but other aspects are increasing: whether they believe in the values
of the company, such as sustainability.
Glenn Jordan: 20 years ago we never had this challenge with talent.
The reality is that there will be a lot of rotation, mobility. So the
companies that people will choose are the ones who can think differently.
So companies have to build processes which allow that to
happen without interrupting the business.
Harish Manwani: In the past we always talked about loyalty as premium.
It has to be shifted from loyalty to commitment.
Glenn Jordan: We think about formation and not organisation.
Scott: Price: One customer gave us this feedback in China:” We
want you to have this cereal. This one but without the raisins.” Customers
are becoming incredibly demanding. We used to think that
50,000 SKUs in a store were enough to satisfy our customers. But
that is why people rushing on-line. Because they can find 100,000 -
1 million SKUs. So it is not only a supply chain challenge but also
customers are demanding much more than a retailer could potentially
provide. So it is an interesting dynamic. Customer demand is a
very powerful engine of change.
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