The winner of the 2020 edition of the top 28 Supply Chain Executives in Europe is Dirk Holbach, Corporate SVP and Chief Supply Chain Officer at Henkel, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He climbed from the fourth position in the Supply Chain Executives Europe Top 28 in 2019, to the first position in 2020. Further, this year we find David Prinselaar, Chief Supply Chain Officer at AkzoNobel at position two and at position three, we find Francesca Gamboni, SVP Supply Chain within Groupe PSA. Encouragingly, the number of women in the Top 28 has doubled this year, taking the total from three women in 2019 to six women in 2020.
Supply Chain Media and Inspired-Search first scanned the top European executives and prepared a longlist of 106 supply chain executives residing and working in the EU region. All these executives have responsibility globally or at least within the European or EMEA region. The methodology for the Top 28 is based on research into published company data and financial reports. Even more importantly, peer voting and an executive survey are used to determine the executives’ responsibility, span of control and impact within their organizations. The ranking is based on four quadrants: 1) Company Success; 2) Personal Responsibility; 3) Personal Visibility; and 4) Peer Votes. Each quadrant has a weighting of 25%, and the scores are indexed to arrive at a total final score.
Dirk Holbach has been working at Henkel in various executive positions in Supply Chain, Operations, Purchasing and Sales since 1996, when he started in Corporate Purchasing after finishing his master’s degree. This was followed by various assignments in Germany. Having finished his PhD during a sabbatical period, in 2002 he moved to Mexico integrating two newly acquired businesses. Thereafter he returned to the headquarters and was in charge of global purchasing for the Laundry & Home Care business for several years until 2007. Dirk subsequently took control of the global supply chain for the same business, and a few years later gained global responsibility for the manufacturing operations. Since 2014, he has been successfully leading the entire Supply Chain & Operations unit for the Laundry & Home Care division as Corporate Senior Vice President and Chief Supply Chain Officer.
In his current role, he has responsibility for a global head count of more than 7,000 associates in 33 factories and 47 logistics centers around the globe. Dirk is one of the most influential and visionary leaders in sup- ply chain. This is also evident in his relentless pursuit of excellence, both at Henkel and in his personal journey. His progress is reflected in his climb in this ranking, from 9th place in 2018 to 4th place in 2019 and now to the top spot in 2020.
Despite COVID-19, he remains one of the top three most visible leaders in Europe and has shared his extensive technological expertise during many appearances at online conferences, webinars and educational events this year. His qualities and charisma are underlined by his success as one of the top four in terms of peer votes. His strategic priorities supporting the purposeful growth strategy of the company are digitalization, sustainability, innovation, system visibility and collaboration.
His key contributions have been in the areas of supply chain strategy and organizational development, network optimization, post-merger integrations and recently the digital transformation of the organization. The multi-year, multi-dimensional transformation delivered significant financial contributions and increased the responsiveness, agility and resilience of global supply chain. In that context, the BU Supply Chain was recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of 14 digital E2E lighthouses globally in the field of advanced manufacturing/Industry 4.0.
To read the full article and see who else has secured him- or herself a place in the top 28 of Supply Chain Executives Europe 2020, download the PDF file on the right.
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