From Fragmented to Best-in-Class: An End-to-End Supply Chain Strategy Rebuild Delivering ~€100M

A global leader in industrial machining equipment manufacturing was carrying a supply chain that no longer matched the strength of its market position. Demand was healthy and the footprint was worldwide, but the system underneath leaked value at every step.

Customer availability ran far below where it needed to be — around 60% against a strategic aspiration closer to 92% — and the gap was being papered over rather than closed. Forecasting weakness and locally optimised decisions pushed inventory and working capital well above what the business should have needed, while the same planning gaps forced a heavy, expensive reliance on air freight simply to keep promises the network could not otherwise keep. Obsolescence and provisioning gaps quietly eroded the balance sheet, and because execution was fragmented across regions and divisions, none of it could be fixed at scale.

Leadership responded by framing the problem as a single, financially anchored ambition. The program was set up to chase roughly €100M of total value potential, concentrated in four levers touching both the P&L and the balance sheet: service level, inventory, transport cost, and obsolescence. The mandate was explicit: create an end-to-end transformation, not isolated improvements.

Before any execution began, the programme made four connected strategic decisions about how the supply chain should compete. Each attacked a structural root cause rather than a symptom, and each was a deliberate bet. Only once the direction was set did delivery follow - running structural redesign and rapid value capture in parallel, not in sequence.

Part A - The Strategic Decisions

Four choices, made as a connected set - not a menu of improvements.

1 - Reclaim Control: Centralise the Operating Model
The keystone decision: move supply chain authority from autonomous regions to a single global function, with shared KPIs and a direct line into P&L reporting. Local optimisation had been individually rational for each region and collectively destructive - only one owner of the end-to-end system could trade off across regions. The bet: absorb the friction of recentralisation to make every downstream decision improvable for the first time.

2 - Re-Architect the Footprint: Tier and Consolidate the Network
Replace an accreted regional warehouse base with a deliberate global, regional, and local distribution-centre hierarchy - consolidating nodes to strip out fixed cost while repositioning stock closer to demand. The bet: fewer, better-placed locations would lower fixed cost and lift availability at the same time, rather than forcing a trade between the two.

3 - Flip the Planning Paradigm: Pull, Not Push
Abandon forecast-led local stocking for demand-driven, pull-based replenishment, governed by a genuine S&OP process. The bet - the one that dissolved the central tension of the business: a clean demand signal would let inventory fall and availability rise at the same time, reversing years of managing the two as opposites.

4 - Re-Engineer Cost-to-Serve: Make Transport a Deliberate Choice
Centralise mode selection and structurally rebalance freight from air to sea and ground. The bet: expediting was a symptom, not a cost of doing business - once the demand signal could be trusted, premium freight became a choice to be made deliberately rather than a tax the network paid to keep its promises.

Part B - From Decision to Delivery: Implementation

With the direction set, execution turned the decisions into booked value - structural redesign and rapid capture running together, never in sequence.

Parallel by design
Structural redesign and rapid value capture ran simultaneously, so the programme funded itself and held momentum while the operating-model change took hold.

Rapid taskforces
Focused teams drove the decisions into the highest-impact regions first - inventory, transport cost, availability, and manufacturing capacity alignment - proving the new model where it mattered most before scaling it.

Capability, not just structure
New S&OP and demand-management capability made the pull model durable - a permanent way of working rather than a one-time inventory reset.

Value-leakage sweep
A systematic pass on weak forecasting and order handling, customs and compliance inefficiency, and obsolete and excess inventory closed the quiet financial drains the structural moves did not touch directly.

The decisions produced substantial, measurable impact inside the first year while leaving behind a platform built to keep delivering.

• ~€60M of benefits booked in year one - comfortably inside the €40-70M target range - with service-level improvement contributing ~€13M and inventory optimisation the largest single driver.
• Availability climbed where it mattered: from ~60% to ~70% for the first division, from ~75% to ~85% for the second - with better delivery reliability and far less need to expedite.
• Structurally, the business gained what it had been missing: a scalable global supply chain platform, genuine cross-regional transparency, and fact-based decision-making anchored in shared KPIs.
• The programme was positioned to deliver the full €100M target - turning a one-year result into a durable capability.