Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Innovation at Unilever - CXOTalk

Supply chain management (SCM) is a competitive differentiator at Unilever. The Unilever supply chain extends beyond the manufacturing process into the core of digital transformation using artificial intelligence to manage supply chain risks and ensure the company can meet customer demand.

To learn more, we spoke with Wendy Herrick, Unilever's head of Digital Supply Chain. Wendy has 25+ years in Unilever and has held leadership roles across both Finance and Supply Chain. She started her career with Unilever in Bristol, England, and has worked in numerous countries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

In this conversation, we discuss the following:
-- About global supply chain management at Unilever
-- Supply chain and digital transformation
-- Cognitive automation, Aera Technology, and supply chain resilience
-- Supply chain innovation and digital transformation strategy
-- SCM and machine learning
-- How Unilever manages potential supply chain disruptions

In 2015, Wendy was appointed to the position of VP Supply Chain US responsible for end to end Supply Chain integration, Supply Chain Digital Strategy, and in-market business results. She was appointed Head of Digital Supply Chain in July 2018.

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From the conversation:

SCM and machine learning

Michael Krigsman: You mentioned AI and machine learning. Where does that come into play with supply chain?

Wendy Herrick: Absolutely critical, so even if you look at the jobs of the future and what people want to be doing, they don't want to be working on spreadsheets and doing the same job day in and day out every day. We want to create the jobs of the future. We want to have the process of the future.

When you start to segment your processes and your decisions, there are some decisions that a machine can take an awful lot quicker than a human and take in a lot more information. But then there are those decisions that are more complex and really need that human in the loop there.

Human out of the loop, the machine can do just as good of a job. Then when it's in the loop, it's really in between the two of them and how you basically segment your decisions in that sort of way.