My last experience: 14 months Transition Management in Shannon (Ireland) for Schwartz Pharma.

At the end of 2007, at a time where everybody was ready to celebrate Christmas, I was contacted by the Supply Chain Director of Schwartz Pharma in Shannon (Ireland).
Following a Management decision the Supply Chain Manager of the Plant had just been dismissed, and the question was : “ Are you ready to come to Ireland to fulfill the job until the end of a new recruitment ? ”
The first working day of 2008, I took over the job, initially for a 3 months mission.
In two words, the Shannon Plant is manufacturing the bulk of an old range of products, but more than this it’s also Controlling and Planning the entire Supply Chain of one of the Blockbuster of the group manufactured in 3 different plants in Germany.
When I arrived, the Supply Chain Direction was divided in 3 parts: Supply (Production and procurement Planning), Demand (Customer Service, sales & marketing), Warehouse.
The situation I found there was strange; after an interview of each member of the team, I quickly discovered that all people were willing to work although their knowledge in Supply Chain was poor. The system they were using was SAP, but the configuration of the ERP was very basic and had never evolved since it was implemented in 2003. But more than this the atmosphere between the people and in particular the relationships between the Supply Team and the Customer Service & Demand team were extremely bad.
My first job was to reestablish normal working conditions between the people. Therefore immediately decided to formalize daily and weekly meetings with all demand and Supply people. The purpose of course was not to organize meetings for the pleasure of doing it, but just to force people to work together around the key Supply Chain Processes:
1. Sales & Operations Planning
2. Master production Schedule
3. Scheduling of Production and Shipment
4. Follow up of Execution (Shipment, Production)

Also, during these meetings I tried as much as possible to use my sense of humor, to facilitate discussions and remove the stress between the people.
One of the great challenge I had to face during my stay, was the Irish culture, a culture made of enthusiasm and traditions often hidden behind a strange “ocean of tranquility”…. Also I have always been very surprise about the “learning curve” of the people, a curve that I had never seen before in any of the countries where I worked in the past ( Brasil, China, France, Netherland, UK,…)
For example It took ages before the Supply & demand team became able to do a good Sales and Operations Planning. I finally discovered the only way to teach them something, was to asked them to practice and practice, rather than spending hours in a classroom.

After 3 months a new Supply Chain Manager came in the company and after a few days of “knowledge transfer” he became autonomous.

After this first mission, the Supply Chain Director asked me to stay longer in order to remodel SAP for the management of their Blockbuster manufactured in Germany. This mission appeared after a modification of the Business model the Company was using to Supply this product.

In this project management role I started to revise and prototype in SAP the different processes, before delivering training to people:
1. Receiving and analyzing Sales Forecast
2. Treating customer Orders
3. Material allocation
4. Preparation of shipment
5. Invoicing
6. Analyzing Master Production Schedule and MRP
7. Creating purchase orders
8. Follow-up of executions with sub contractors
9. Master Data creation and Update.


After a successful “Go live” of the SAP remodeling project in September 2008, I was asked to stay until the end of the year to do the same exercise for the old Products they were manufacturing.

In December 2008 the Production Manager made me an offer to prepare and deliver a SAP training for all the Production Supervisors. At this time almost nobody in Production had a single idea of what SAP was and a lot of errors were generated at the end of a Production, which was creating big troubles in Finance. Therefore I developed a special training program for “Operations” which lead to an intensive 2 months program with 5 modules:
1. Master Data
2. Production Planning, MRP, Scheduling
3. Creating, Releasing Process Orders
4. Confirming, closing Process Orders
5. Correcting errors and COGI’s

At the end of February 2009 I was very pleased to celebrate with the Shannon the Success of our joined efforts in a very nice restaurant in Bunraty.