The Supply Chain Director resume,
service and cash, in that order.
Supply chain is judged on two numbers that pull against each other: whether the customer received what they ordered, and how much cash stood still to make that possible. The page usually describes an ERP rollout, a warehouse move and a set of dashboards. Those are the means. A COO reads for the trade-off you made, and whether you admitted making it.
The network you actually ran
One title sits over very different machines. Inbound and supplier management in a plant-heavy manufacturer is not the job of outbound distribution for a retailer with 400 stores, and neither resembles running third-party logistics for a business that owns no assets. Say what moved, how far, at what temperature and against what shelf life. Those constraints decide which of your results transfer to the company reading.
Then say what reported to you. Planning, procurement, manufacturing scheduling, warehousing, transport and customer service answer to one director in some organisations and to four people in others. A director who owned planning but not procurement negotiated with a colleague for every input assumption, and that is worth stating rather than leaving to be found.
The physical network: plants, distribution centres, active SKUs, order lines a day, and the borders goods crossed.
Which functions reported to you — planning, procurement, warehousing, transport, customer service — and which did not.
Product characteristics that set the difficulty: shelf life, cold chain, regulated goods, seasonality, and whether demand was forecast or ordered.
Spend under your control, split between freight, warehousing and direct materials, and the purchase order value you could approve alone.
Service against cash
Every figure below already sits in a weekly operations pack. The discipline is reporting the pair rather than the flattering half. Service improved while inventory fell is a result; service improved on a larger stockholding is a purchase, and an experienced reader will assume the second until told otherwise.
On-time-in-full measured at the customer's door, with the definition attached and the starting position. OTIF measured at dispatch flatters, and everyone who has run a network knows it.
Inventory turns alongside the working capital tied up in stock, in currency. Turns describe the operation; the cash figure is what the CFO carries to the board.
Landed cost per unit or per case rather than total freight spend, because volume moves the total and only the unit rate proves the network itself got cheaper.
Freight as a share of sales with the mode mix beside it, since a fall achieved by moving air to sea is a service decision to be owned, not a saving to be claimed.
Supplier count at both ends, with the share of spend held by the top ten and the single-sourced lines you accepted. Consolidation without that second figure is concentration risk written as an achievement.
Forecast accuracy and the stockout rate it produced, because together they explain both the service number and the inventory number, and a page quoting neither gives outcomes without their cause.
Systems are not results
Three claims are near universal in this function. Each names a piece of machinery or a method. None states what the customer received or what the balance sheet did afterwards.
“Implemented SAP and an advanced planning system across the network.” A go-live is a date. Give the planning cycle before and after, the forecast accuracy that followed, and the stock that came out.
“Applied lean and Six Sigma to drive continuous improvement.” Method is not outcome. Name one line, one process, one number, and what it was worth over a full year.
“Managed end-to-end supply chain operations across the region.” That is a job description. State the service level you held, at what inventory cover, and what you gave up to hold it.
Three lines, rewritten.
The same fact, made checkable. Every figure is illustrative of the shape an evidenced line takes — nothing here is invented on your behalf.
The claim on the left is not wrong. It is simply unreadable as evidence: nothing in it can be checked, compared or priced. The version on the right makes the same statement in a form a search partner can act on.
Improved supply chain efficiency and reduced costs across the distribution network.
Took OTIF from 87% to 96.4% measured at customer receipt while cutting finished-goods cover from 61 to 42 days, releasing $8.4M of working capital. Both moved on a single demand plan replacing three, agreed monthly with sales and frozen for the first four weeks.
Led a freight tender that delivered savings across road and ocean lanes.
Retendered 140 lanes from six carriers down to three, with volume commitments by lane. Landed cost per case fell from $2.84 to $2.31 on flat volume, worth $2.6M a year, and the mode mix was unchanged. Transit reliability rose from 82% to 93% on the same measurement.
Managed the response to global supply disruption, ensuring business continuity.
Lost the sole supplier of two components nine weeks before peak season. Qualified two alternates in five weeks, air-freighted 11 weeks of cover at $1.9M against $14M of revenue exposure, and held OTIF at 94%. Dual-sourced 38 of 46 critical lines the following year, adding 3% to unit cost.