AI IN SUPPLY CHAIN
Q . TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOU AND YOUR CAREER SO FAR
» I ’ m actually English , even though these days I sound more Australian or South African . From a very early age , I was always into coding . I ’ ve always had a very strong imagination and the thing I loved about coding was it was a blank screen with a flashing green cursor and you could use it to basically create anything , so I was writing video games from the age of 12 .
I went to school at UCL and my first job out of university was with Andersen Consulting , now part of Accenture , which allowed me to use code to solve problems in the real world . My first project was putting in a warehouse management system ( WMS ) at Selfridges , so I was involved in supply chain very early , but always on the product and consultative side , which gives you empathy .
From there , I went to a project at Littlewoods up in Liverpool where I wrote a forecasting and replenishment system and , from that point onwards , I pretty much stayed in engineering . I was very lucky to be at a bunch of different companies that , at various points in time , rode different computing transitions . I was at a retail merchandising company called Retek in the late 1990s and we rode the whole wave of omnichannel . com , going public in 1999 before we sold to Oracle . Then I went to Infor where we rode the transition of taking industry software to the cloud and we built the first industry cloud computing company .
Now , at Blue Yonder , we ’ re riding the wave of AI , the rise of the data cloud , robotics and beyond . So , my career has always capitalised on an epoch that drives fundamental change at a business and society level . I get to wake up every day and reimagine the world of supply chain through the lens of AI and robotics – and we ’ re finally headline news . Everyone knows what a supply chain is now .
Q . WHAT WAS IT THAT ATTRACTED YOU TO BLUE YONDER ?
» There ’ s a massive amount of business change going on in supply chains – the biggest we ’ ve seen for 30 years . Combined with the emergence of all of this new , revolutionary technology , you have this canvas for reinvention . On the business side , we ’ re experiencing what I ’ d call the age of uncertainty to a level we ’ ve never seen before . It ’ s being driven by climate change , labour shortages and the rewiring of the world due to regional unfriendliness .
What ’ s exciting about Blue Yonder is that we have the ability to step back and say ‘ we need a new blueprint and new technology on top of which to reimagine it ’. It ’ s the perfect recipe and we ’ re backed by an unbelievable sponsor in Panasonic that allows us to do unnatural , almost unfair things in the market – to invest in a cycle with this much opportunity . I ’ ve been in the supply chain space for 25-30 years , so I ’ ve been in and around Blue Yonder products for a long time and was used to competing with them . The opportunity to lead the company through the next phase of its journey was one I just couldn ’ t turn down .
52 February 2025