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.