The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Haslam College of Business’ Global Supply Chain Institute (GSCI) hosted its Fall 2024 Supply Chain Forum November 12-14. During the biannual event, supply chain leaders, faculty and students heard presentations and discussions on important issues in the industry. The forum’s opening session featured Jennifer “Jen” Kelly, vice president of planning in North America for Schneider Electric (SE). A global powerhouse in electrification, digitization and automation, The company is at the forefront of innovating the planning process to improve supply chain performance. In 2023 and 2024, Gartner ranked it as the world’s leading supply chain organization, and Time Magazine recently ranked it as the world’s No. 1 most sustainable company.
After delivering a presentation on SE’s operations and aspirations, Kelly sat for a Q&A session with GSCI’s co-executive director, Ted Stank. Their talk covered multiple areas of SE’s operations and supply chain in general.
Stank: To what do you attribute Gartner’s No. 1 Supply Chain Company Ranking?
Kelly: “A lot of it is the vision and the drive for autonomous planning, what we’re doing to truly connect our systems end-to-end and the digital transformation we’re on. We are shifting our products and portfolio to digital to have innovative solutions for homes and businesses.”
Stank: What is the challenge of getting structured data?
Kelly: “That is an area where we continue to ensure that we have the right checks and balances in place with our master data. SE’s benefit is that they see these opportunities and invest quickly in themselves to support it.
“SE has a department of master data governance, each team has a master data analyst, and each plant has one as well to ensure they have the right data. Because if we don’t have our master data right, obviously, all the outputs we’re going to get are incorrect, too.”
Stank: Is SE’s planning capability improving its cash flow? And how does that improve sustainability?
Kelly: “Our third-quarter results were recently released, so I can share that in North America, we’ve grown 15 percent in top-line versus the prior year,” adding that, in the region, SE delivered about $12 billion in sales.
“SE is committed to investing in innovation and expansion, capitalizing on opportunities to reach net zero by 2050, offering an incentive bonus program for employees based on a sustainability score.”
Stank: How is SE protecting itself from risks, including potential future tariffs?
Kelly: “SE is working on what we call the ‘power of two’ to build redundancies in our supply chain so it is not dependent on Europe or Asia for components. SE, historically, was a very lean organization. When you think about the globalization of supply chains, they did a fantastic job of being super lean, super effective. But in this day and age, being super lean globally is not the best position, which is why we’ve transitioned to supply reliability, local production and that power of two.”
Stank: How is SE approaching automation and planning to make those an avenue of revenue growth?
Kelly: “Before, we weren’t doing a five-year detailed plan in our supply chain. Now, we do that every year, where we’re partnering with our strategy groups, with our sales and marketing organization, to look at these opportunities and to truly map them out end-to-end and talk about what type of investments that we need.”
Stank: You’ve made some changes that have helped improve the performance of your vendor partners. How is what you’re doing benefiting them?
Kelly: “Part of our measurement is no longer looking at strictly forecast accuracy, but we’re also measuring ourselves on vendor forecast stability. Obviously, forecasts are going to change up and down, but we want to make sure we understand why. As soon as we see a major change, we can clearly articulate that to our suppliers. We’ve put in place an upstream planning team, which is dedicated to planning directly with our suppliers.
“This team is able to collect all the information from the plants. We consolidate our forecast. In times of shortages, allocations or priorities, we’re able to say, ‘This is truly the priority. This is the plant that we need to ship it to.’ We’ve tried to simplify the ways of working for our suppliers quite significantly.”
Save the Date
The Spring Supply Chain Forum will be held April 10-12, 2025, at the Marriott Knoxville Downtown. The event is exclusive to over 80 organizations that partner with UT to learn, network and recruit the best supply chain talent. For more information about the forum or to learn more about becoming a Supply Chain Forum Partner, contact the GSCI.
Main photo: Ted Stank and Jen Kelly at the GSCI Supply Chain Forum
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Scott McNutt, business writer/publicist, rmcnutt4@utk.edu
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