
TOP SUPPLY CHAIN LEADERS 2023

Dirk Holbach
CSVP and CSCO Henkel Consumer Brands Henkel BV
Dirk Holbach‘s childhood dream was designing and building cars, which resulted in him becoming an engineer. During various internships, he witnessed the science as well as the beauty of how cars get assembled – This operation looks like 50,000 puzzle pieces getting together at the right point in time. That was the moment Dirk realized that without orchestrating the manufacturing of such a complex product, the greatest design is void, at that moment he fell in love with operations. Years later he found the second love in his life, his brilliant and beautiful wife, and three smart kids, that broadened him with different perspectives of this world every day. Another big passion is biking, where his target is to bike every year at least 10,000 km.
Message to the Supply Chain Community
This recognition humbles me personally, and at the same time makes me feel deeply proud. Proud of a fantastic team, hundreds and thousands of colleagues contributing to this achievement more than anything else over the last years; it is a clear recognition of all their vision, passion, and hard work driving our continuous transformation and value creation.
High-performing businesses are built on high-performing operations. The competitiveness of businesses will be in the future increasingly powered by the capabilities and the performance of their supply chains. The fascinating mission to understand, design, and operate highly complex value chains has become a constant boardroom topic. We as a Global Supply Chain community need to learn, how to tell the right stories about our profession, to ensure an even higher awareness of what we make & move every day. 4IR technologies will ultimately lead to highly transparent, real-time, increasingly autonomously, self-operating Supply Chains. However ultimately operations are and will be a people business; people operate supply chains, where their passion, capabilities, and culture drive performance.
CASE STUDY
Driving long-term, and holistic Supply Chain Transformation leveraging 4IR
“After having constantly redesigned, restructured, and continuously improved our supply chain operations over many years, marginal returns, namely annual productivity improvements started to flatten out. For example, incremental gains in equipment efficiency (OEE), fill rates/service levels (OTIF), and step-changes inventories (days) decreased in magnitude. Similar patterns were observed for Sustainability (energy consumption in kWh/t, CO2/t, water consumption in m3/t, waste in kg/t) didn’t significantly improve any longer.”