Catching Up With Steve Sigrist, Newell Rubbermaid, Wal-Mart Division

CGT Executive Editor Kara Romanow talks with Steve Sigrist, vice president of supply chain and sales operations, Newell Rubbermaid, Wal-Mart Division. He shares best practices around transportation and distribution and reveals what Newell Rubbermaid does to drive internal collaboration.

What keeps you up at night?
Sigrist: I want to know how I can specifically identify the value we provide our customer by optimizing our supply chain and taking the efforts to synchronize with our customer's supply chain. I want to understand how my company is measuring up against other manufacturers who are making attempts to align their supply chain with the customer base. What is working with these manufacturers that I may not know about? And how do I keep an ear to the ground to make sure I don't miss a potential "game changer" that could be developing?

How can manufacturers and retailers better collaborate?
Sigrist: For Newell Rubbermaid it's all about the execution of consumer-centric strategies. Our efforts are geared towards developing a culture that is innovative, brand-focused and global reaching. This is exciting for us and we want to share our findings with our trade customers. This leads us to reach out for enhanced collaborative sessions, but retailers can drive the process with a simple invitation to the manufacturers. Most manufacturers inherently understand the business gains that can stem from enhanced collaboration and will often leap at the opportunity to have alignment conversations.    

A successful dialog begins when both the manufacturer and the retailer bring data to the discussion. Key metrics on merchandise flow, in-stock positions, point-of-sale performance, forecasting performance accuracy and service level performance play a key role in the establishment of the replenishment strategies and adjustments that are required to improve mutual performance. Both sides must also work together to develop a regular meeting rhythm to review progress on the determined initiatives and review the data trends. The "one and done" meetings don't yield much value if there's not an agreement to routinely examine the progress and obstacles impeding progress.

How have you leveraged data to provide better insights and better meet your customers' expectations?
Sigrist: Our team routinely gathers vast amounts of transportation, distribution or merchandise flow data from multiple internal sources and then applies significant effort to succinctly recap the key points to the customer. We take great care that we don't overload the customer with vast amounts of data in order to reach a conclusion on an improvement opportunity. Instead, we find it productive to streamline the communication with summary level reporting and then utilize the supporting data to simply validate the rigor in our analytical processes. By keeping the information "clean and to-the-point" we build customer confidence in our suggestions and find that they now more warmly welcome other proactive improvement plans we may submit. 

To make this possible we continually ask the customer (our retailer) about what information is important to them. From our conversations, our retail merchants repeatedly remind us that the focus should be on the consumer's experience. As such we must know the data associated with these questions: Was the store easy to shop? Did we have the right selection of goods? Did the store experience meet expectations? Was the product in stock? Priced accurately? Effectively displayed? Did it reflect a competitive value?   

To prepare for these anticipated discussions, we build our data collection processes and reporting processes around these key areas. We then find that the time invested in the planning phases can be leveraged when we deploy sound extract tools to present our information to the customer.

Can you share best practices for internal collaboration? How do you bring employees from different business processes and disciplines together?
Sigrist: One of the habits in the "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" [Stephen F. Covey's bestseller on personal effectiveness] is to "seek first to understand before being understood." I find that by applying this principle as an ongoing best practice I gain a broader perspective on how the many facets of our organization work and what can motivate us to work better together to meet the needs of our customers. It boils down to listen more and talk less. While the practical focus remains on gathering facts and making sure I'm presenting a clear presentation of the situational opportunity that I'd like to explore -- I've got to make certain that I'm not overlooking others who could often be thinking, "what's in it for me?"

Another important aspect to drive collaboration is the organizational alignment. In 2007, we introduced a new organizational platform build at Newell Rubbermaid around Global Business Units (GBUs), which supports our powerful brands and product categories. The GBUs enable us to better leverage our understanding of the unique consumers and competitors around the world. Some of the strengths of this matrix organization include the ability for faster innovation and to leverage our economies of scale.