Harness Culture to Drive Value with Zoetis’ Supply Chain EVP
Dec 13, 2024
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Nick Ashton, Executive Vice President at Zoetis, shares insights on how a positive culture fuels supply chain success. He discusses empowering teams through transparency and access to data, which fosters trust and collaboration. The conversation highlights the shift from rigid communication to real-time interactions, enhancing data accuracy and boosting employee satisfaction. Ashton also provides actionable recommendations for CSCOs aiming to leverage culture for organizational transformation, proving that a strong culture drives measurable business impacts.
A transparent and collaboration-focused culture at Zoetis significantly enhances employee engagement and aligns workforce goals with business objectives.
Empowering supply chain talent through access to real-time data and decision-making frameworks leads to measurable business impacts and improved collaboration.
Deep dives
The Importance of Organizational Culture
Culture plays a critical role in driving supply chain success, with a strong focus on aligning an organization’s workforce to achieve key business objectives. A purpose-driven culture at Zoetis emphasizes two main anchors: helping to feed the world through livestock and caring for companion animals. Leadership at Zoetis recognizes that a healthy culture fosters employee engagement and performance, noting that the legacy command-and-control style is not suitable for meeting today's organizational goals. Transitioning toward a culture that prioritizes transparency, collaboration, and empowerment is essential for future-proofing the company.
Empowerment Through Communication and Training
Empowering team members is fundamental for fostering a culture of accountability and initiative, but it requires concrete actions and frameworks to back up this commitment. Zoetis establishes clear expectations for empowerment by involving leadership in a collective commitment and providing the necessary data and insights for informed decision-making. The organization also invests in frontline supervisor training to ensure that employees feel equipped to utilize data effectively, thus enhancing their confidence in making decisions. Celebrating successes and addressing failures as learning opportunities further supports an increasingly empowered workforce.
Data-Driven Decision Making and Business Impact
The integration of real-time data tools and a unified data strategy has significantly improved communication and decision-making across Zoetis’s supply chain operations. By moving away from rigid monthly meetings to a more dynamic interaction with accessible data, teams can address issues and opportunities in real-time. This approach has resulted in enhanced collaboration among different departments, minimizing conflicts and aligning supply signals with commercial demand. The effectiveness of these changes is reflected in record-low lost sales, illustrating that empowered teams utilizing accurate data can drive substantial business impacts.
The critical role that transparent, collaboration-focused culture plays in supply chain success at Zoetis. (1:04)
How Zoetis empowers supply chain talent to trust in and engage with this culture. (4:08)
Qualitative and quantitative business impacts that empowered supply chain talent has made at Zoetis. (8:34)
Why providing their staff with access to good data enabled a cultural shift. (15:12)
Recommendations for CSCOs seeking to drive business impacts through their supply chain’s culture. (19:18)
In this episode of the Supply Chain Podcast, host Thomas O’Connor discusses how culture can drive supply chain value with Nick Ashton, Executive Vice President and President, Global Manufacturing and Supply at Zoetis. The pair explore how Zoetis shifted its culture by providing greater access to data and empowering employees with greater decision making. As the organization shifted towards greater transparency and collaboration, measurable business impacts followed. Thomas and Nick close the show with recommendations for CSCOs who want to effect similar transformations in their own organizations.
About the Guest
Nick Ashton is Executive Vice President and President, Global Manufacturing and Supply at Zoetis, the world’s leading animal health company and a member of the Fortune 500. In this role, he oversees the company’s network of approximately 29 Zoetis manufacturing sites and 200 third-party manufacturers around the world. Nick joined Zoetis in 2020 as head of Global External Supply, where he led all aspects of the company’s global external manufacturing network, overseeing 140 contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs) to keep pace with customer demand.
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