Things would be very different today—for me, my colleagues, and my company—if the votes of Whirlpool’s North American leadership team had swung in a different direction on May 3, 2001. It was a move I hadn’t expected; Mike Todman, our executive vice president at the time, decided to go around the table and ask each member of his staff for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on the investment that Paul Dittmann and I had just formally proposed. Did I look worried? I can’t imagine I didn’t, even though we’d spent hours in individual meetings with each of them, getting their ideas and buy-in. We thought we had everyone’s support. But the facts remained: Our proposal had a bigger price tag than any supply chain investment in the company’s history. We were asking for tens of millions during a period of general belt-tightening. Some of it was slated for new hires, even as cutbacks were taking place elsewhere in the company. And Paul and I, the people doing the asking, were coming from the supply chain organization.
Leading a Supply Chain Turnaround
Reprint: R0410G
Just five years ago, salespeople at Whirlpool were in the habit of referring to their supply chain organization as the “sales disablers.” Now the company excels at getting products to the right place at the right time—while managing to keep inventories low. How did that happen? In this first-person account, Reuben Slone, Whirlpool’s vice president of Global Supply Chain, describes how he and his colleagues devised the right supply chain strategy, sold it internally, and implemented it.
Slone insisted that the right focal point for the strategy was the satisfaction of consumers at the end of the supply chain. Most supply chain initiatives do the opposite: They start with the realities of a company’s manufacturing base and proceed from there. Through a series of interviews with trade customers large and small, his team identified 27 different capabilities that drove industry perceptions of Whirlpool’s performance. Knowing it was infeasible to aim for world-class performance across all of them, Slone weighed the costs of excelling at each and found the combination of initiatives that would provide overall competitive advantage.
A highly disciplined project management office and broad training in project management were key to keeping work on budget and on benefit. Slone set an intense pace—three “releases” of new capabilities every month—that the group maintains to this day. Lest this seem like a technology story, however, Slone insists it is just as much a “talent renaissance.” People are proud today to be part of Whirlpool’s supply chain organization, and its new generation of talent will give the company a competitive advantage for years to come.
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