[00:00:00] Mike Ogle: Welcome to another episode in the Day of the Life series of the Supply Chain Careers podcast. In this series, you hear directly from supply chain professionals about their current positions, their day-to-day responsibilities, what they enjoy about their positions, and how to best prepare yourself to be successful to do the work, plus what it takes to get there and continue advancing along the many career paths in supply chain.
This podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group. The industry leading supply chain executive search firm. Visit SCM talent [email protected].
[00:00:47] Rodney Apple: Welcome to the Supply Chain Careers podcast. This is our special series day in the life of a supply chain professional. In this series, we provide first person insights from supply chain professionals and executives cutting across a wide range of industries. And functions join us as we uncover authentic stories, daily challenges, and career shaping experiences directly from those who power the world’s supply chains.
Whether you’re season experts or you’re just getting started on your career journey, this is a backstage pass to understanding the real work and the real impact of supply chain careers. So we’re gonna dive right in. Our guest today is Fabio Panza. He is a operations director. Fabio, welcome to the show.
[00:01:34] Fabio Paniza: Welcome for Thank you for having me. I.
[00:01:37] Rodney Apple: We’re very excited to have you on today. As I was reviewing your LinkedIn profile, I see you’ve worked in many areas of the supply chain on the end-to-end side and kind of these corporate roles and transformation roles, and you now it’s like you’re leading a pretty significant on the operation side, multiple facilities and multiple teams.
So we’re very excited to talk to you today and I know our audience will gain a lot of value from this episode. So thanks again. Would love to understand if you could maybe just take us through a quick. Overview of your background and how you got started on this supply chain career journey and in particular focus on the role that you’re in now as operations director?
[00:02:15] Fabio Paniza: Of course. So my, I started in a family business, which was a heavy machinery industry and I worked many years there. But I was aspiring to work in a large corporation, so I. Apply for MBA in the US to allow me to go to US learn the US fundamentals of supply chain finance. And then I was hired for a large company, and in this company I was able to work in different capacities.
So I started in finance, I work into project management transformation. Planning and my most current role is director of operations. I have a responsibility over two manufacturing sites, one in US and one in Switzerland. And the operations role includes warehouse of components, receiving, assembly, testing, packaging, uh, of products, and to some extent, we also support this service and repair of these devices as well.
Okay.
[00:03:22] Rodney Apple: Sounds like an exciting role that you’re in now, and multi-site responsibilities, not just in the United States, but you’ve got that global operations oversight as well in addition to the servicing of the devices.
[00:03:35] Fabio Paniza: Yes. No, indeed. I would say I’ve been blessed with this opportunity and through my career progress I was acquiring the right skills and experiences that would allow me to be competitive in this, in getting this role to the, uh, operation.
Uh, roles are very competitive in our industry because they are a natural career progression to a large end-to-end supply chain lead role.
[00:04:04] Rodney Apple: Very good. Yeah, and, and. We talk about this a lot on our podcast, and we see as I got into it 25 years ago, there was probably a lot more manufacturing opportunities than there is today.
Of course, the explosion of e-commerce has created just rapid building and openings of. Fulfillment center. So we’ve seen the operation side of supply chain really grow here. You can think Amazon and everybody that’s followed suit. And obviously with, with things going on now, global trade policies and tariffs, we’re starting to see some bigger investments come in from different industries, pharmaceutical and whatnot.
And, but there is a, I’d love to hear your perspective on this. There is a. A growing concern that a lot of the younger generations are coming up outta college and they’re pursuing the data analytics. There’s automation, robotics, ai, all of these newer technologies, and they’re skipping, pursuing career paths and operations.
But it sounds like what you’ve told me is you’re operations is the sweet spot that’s, that’s where you, your career has culminated towards. Is that fair to say?
[00:05:09] Fabio Paniza: I would say yes. And And I understand that the software, right and the digital. Have become more and more important to the, to our day-to-day lives.
And, but what I would tell to the audience is nothing beats how I would say delivering a product, which in our case also has software on it and saving lives, right? So that’s the inspiration for many of us. Is to understand what the customer’s needs, the doctors, the patients, and transforming that into devices that are saving or improving people’s lives.
It’s really, I would say, a feeling of fulfillment that can fuel your energy right toward your life.
[00:05:53] Rodney Apple: And, and that’s super important to, I think to touch on as well. You bring up a great point and supply chain. I’m not aware of any other area that that has such a large degree of career paths. When you cut across the different functions and procurement and you mentioned you worked in planning and of course manufacturing, logistics, transportation, warehousing, continuous improvement, quality, there’s just a lot.
Of different directions you can go in. And it sounds like you’ve found something that brings a lot of passion. And I think for our audience, that is the challenge when you get into supply chain, uh, the, I think the sooner you figure it out, the better. ’cause I’ve certainly seen people get into areas where they’re like, get me out of here.
And yes. But once you get. I don’t wanna say pigeonholed, but some people do get pigeonholed. It’s, it gets a little bit more challenging to navigate and transfer into other industries. But I’d like to take a little bit of a step back. You mentioned some of the roles that you worked in that led to where you’re at now and helped you develop your, your background in.
Skills, qualifications. But I’d love to touch on some of the hard skills and soft skills that are critical to move into a role like this where you’re leading multiple sites. Getting to be a plant manager is one thing, but moving up to that next degree where you’re leading other senior leaders is certainly, it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to get there.
’cause there’s so many moving parts, uh, literally Yeah. In these roles. But give our audience a good flavor for those soft skills and hard skills. Yeah.
[00:07:18] Fabio Paniza: No, that’s a really good question. So I think the hard skills specifically to the industry I am today, it’s medical device. It’s highly regulated, so you need to know FDA regulations, right?
We now have the UMDR regulations and many countries have their own regulations, so there is. A, a real knowledge and understanding, quality control, inspection, traceability and, and how do you link that into a manufacturing process and how do you order products? That’s real. I would say hard knowledge and you cannot read the book to accomplish that, right?
You have to acquire that over time. Understanding as well, I would say from a hard, hard skill is as an example. How the processes connect to each other, right? So for example, you need to understand transportation. How does it connect to your warehouses space? How do you define the space you need, how many people to work?
So you need to also advance, and it is very important then to use your soft skill like data analytics to help you be successful. If I go into the. Soft skill. So people, leadership, the ability to develop people to, I’m gonna say bring the best on them, to stretch them to some extent so they can grow, keep the team motivated.
And I would say be mindful of your communication, right? Because you have to understand that the audience you’re communicating with, right? So sometimes you have to make very simple because there’s too many information to be passed. Sometimes you need to do a step back and think, can I, or I need to position my communication more strategically to influence the stakeholders.
So definitely, uh, an operations director has to navigate many topics at the same time, and he needs to find, or he or she, right, he needs to find the place to, I’m gonna say accelerate or slow down, right? Many times it’s really maybe like a. Understanding like a knowledge, like a car race, right? That depending on where you are, you know what cars you have by your side in front of you and you have to start reacting to that.
[00:09:38] Rodney Apple: And thank you for that. That’s very helpful and certainly makes sense. And then I. Could you speak a little bit about the global aspects, what you’re leading an operation overseas? So that creates a whole new set of challenges, right? Yes. Cultural and
[00:09:53] Fabio Paniza: yes,
[00:09:53] Rodney Apple: maybe language and other dynamics.
[00:09:56] Fabio Paniza: No, that’s really interesting.
So for me, I had the opportunity in other prior roles to be exposed to many cultures. So I am originally from Brazil, but I had the chance to work with in all regions now. As I had the opportunity to be and work with the Switzerland and then for example, I learned there is a Swiss German, right? I didn’t know there was a variation, but it’s a variation of the German.
And when you enter the cultural aspect, it’s very important for us to recognize that there is a country, let’s say country culture level. And then there’s also a site culture level. They could be very different from our corporate culture. So acknowledging that and trying to communicate in a way that really helps understand, um, many times these same words, have different meanings.
It’s not, it’s something that I have lived into that. But it’s very fulfilling as well because you learn something you didn’t knew and you are able to collaborate and you’re gonna see there is a lot of things that are equal, right? They speak different languages, but you’re gonna see same behaviors and it makes yourself as a stronger leader when you are exposed to that.
[00:11:19] Mike Ogle: During this short break, we recognize that this podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm. Visit SCM talent [email protected].
[00:11:35] Rodney Apple: Absolutely. When we think about the role itself that you’re in, we all are assigned cascaded down from the top, typically goals, objectives, and when we think about manufacturing broadly, obviously we’re producing products, but I’d love for you to maybe. Break that down a little bit because it’s not all about just producing the widgets, right?
There’s a whole lot of other things that are important that go into it spanning the, your metrics and your operational efficiency. Obviously safety and quality, but we’d love to hear your perspective on that piece.
[00:12:08] Fabio Paniza: Yeah, that’s very important. So we always try to create a culture where people understand that safety is the first priority.
Because without safety, we don’t have people. And without people you don’t have quality. And without quality, you can’t produce and get the customer’s recognition to buy again your product. Right? So for me and for my team, safety is the most important one. Right? Then safety is both, let’s say day to day, right, is by example.
You are leaving what you are saying and you are influencing people, but it’s also about processes and equipment. So you have to look all dimensions, right? Are we educating the people, but are we giving them the right tools to be safe? So there is a very tactical element to safety that we have to do. And when possible can we have leading indicators for safety?
So for example, we use what we call the good safes, right? Like where we are trying to get engagement of people to proactively tell us of potential risks. So this is one critical element for me. Manufacturing, right? Leading indicators are hard to get because they can be biased, but the more you can enable leading indicators, the more effective you’ll be in addressing their problems before they arise.
Quality is another element that, in my view, we like to say that quality is what is in what we do. Quality is not another dimension of what I do, and now I produce and then I do quality right. We have to do all at the same time. So what I do has to be with quality. For quality, and because we are in a regulated environment, we have to be able to prove that.
So just doing it is not enough. So does my, does the forms, the instructions, the procedures are being followed, and mistakes are part of the process, right? We do mistakes, so we have to prove that we are able to find these mistakes. Get better right from that. So our quality system has to be robust and the operations side, which I truly enjoy a lot, is really.
Helping people be successful. I, I start from the point of view that everybody wants to end the day and say, I did more than I should. I was successful in what I did. I produced with quality, I was able to partner with my colleagues. So how do we help them do that? And many times the role of a leader is to really remove the roadblocks so they can fulfill what they want, and they get, in the end of the day happy because they, they also help save lives.
That’s for me as part of the manufacturing. Now, what I would like to say that we need to continue embrace is really the digital aspect of our manufacturing. How can we leverage these tools, right? Data analytics, AI and other capabilities, dashboards that can help us be more proactive versus reactive, integrate to the different data points.
And for me, one good example is. If my component arrives and is not within a spec, then most likely the product I’m gonna produce is not gonna be in spec. So how do I connect the dots? So people talk a lot about supply changes, the linkage of the different processes, and that’s true. You need to monitor all the different steps so you can get in the end, and then you’ll get a quality product, right?
[00:15:43] Rodney Apple: That’s absolutely right. Yeah. I love the way you think about that and quality service, safety, all of those things are important and obviously we’re trying, there’s the financial component of it as well. I. And I think one thing that’s, that, that’s important to call out is a lot of people think you’re just day in, day out, making widgets.
And again, we’ve, you’ve clearly communicated that it’s way broader than that and there’s way more important elements as well. But there’s also new product development that goes on and it, it can range the gamut from minor updates to existing products or launching brand new products. Is there anything you’d like to speak to on that piece?
’cause to me that brings the innovation, the r and d all together and. Keep, keeps it exciting versus monotonous.
[00:16:27] Fabio Paniza: Yes, no, definitely. So again, I’ve been blessed. That is, in this current role, I’ve been exposed to. Many new product introductions, which are really breakthrough technologies in the medical field, and I can see how important is the supply chain organization in supporting that advance with quality and as soon as possible right to the market and learning from the customers, right as they provide this feedback on things that we need to improve.
So the new product for me is really an exciting space where people have a chance to collaborate, work together. And I know that one example that I can bring is one of the products that were launched I think three or four years ago during the COVID. I was not there at that point in time, but what people tell me was they were collaborating across four countries, mostly virtual meetings, right?
And they were developing separate parts of this device. They were able to brought all together and launch on time. So you see like how amazing can this be that. We are able to virtually collaborate and create a product that is improving people’s lives and realizing that, and this platform has been growing tremendously, so we are now trying to catch up at the speed of the commercial success.
Right. But it, it is really inspiration for us, right? That we have a role in this process and it’s to really transform the concepts and ideas that are saving lives into a actual software product that is used in many hospitals.
[00:18:05] Rodney Apple: That’s amazing. And that’s the side you want to be on. You’re having to catch up to a commercial success of a company.
You certainly don’t want to be on the other side where you’re making less and having to lay people off and things like that. Yes. Yep. Yes. When you get into the role you’re in a lot. What I see is in operations from those that are very driven and ambitious, they want to keep progressing and some folks may move from leading a function in a plant.
It’s pretty common, and you want to try to go horizontal if you can. If you can make, maybe work in stents in quality or engineering or maintenance or those types of roles to qualify for the general management, you, you could say that too in on broader. Businesses, you want to become a, a general manager or president of a division.
It’s understanding the big ones are sales and, and operations, of course, but once you get to that plant manager level, you could, and it could be moving from a small factory to a much larger one, but a lot of people want to get to the multi-site role too. And that’s the kind of role that you’re in now.
Could you tell our audience a little bit about the steps you took to get qualified for those roles where it becomes a whole lot more strategic than tactical and, and you’re truly leading these other general managers and making and bringing out the best of them. And may, you may dive down a little bit further into their organization, but a lot of it is leading the leaders of these facilities.
Anything you could share there?
[00:19:27] Fabio Paniza: Yes. In my situation, I have a hybrid situation, so I am. The plant manager of one site and I also direct the other plant manager
[00:19:37] Rodney Apple: inter. Interesting. Uh,
[00:19:37] Fabio Paniza: yeah. And uh, what I would say is an operations director needs to be very strong in certain skills, right? For example, you need to understand how to influence other organizations.
So I have to partner well with quality engineering safety. It technology. We have our value streams, which are front with the commercial, and, but you also have to be able to understand productivity, process improvement, planning, and I would say finance, right? To be successful in a role like this, you cannot deliver five of 10 metrics.
You have to deliver, I’m gonna say eight of 10 metrics, right? They go across all these dimensions. So you have to have the safety, the quality finance customer above all right? And you have to have a competitive cost. The more experiences you can have in different roles, it will make you a strong operations lead, right?
So if you have a chance in your career, don’t be afraid to go into different roles that that will be my advice, right? Now leading leaders, right? It means that you have to be open to one. Uh, I would say empower them. So you have to understand that sometimes we may create a vision of how things should operate, but they are the local leader of that, right?
So you have to accept and embrace that they will better translate. The business needs into his team. It may not be the vision that, for example, I have for that location, right? So you have to sit down, create a vision together, and make sure that he is empowered to act right? A plant manager is very reactive role in some aspects, so he needs to make decisions on the spot, and you need to, I would say, accept when you know.
Mistakes will be done and that’s okay. Let’s keep improving and keep moving. So that’s part of the, in my view, leading the leaders, right? My role, it will be remove roadblocks for him. So how do I help him be successful? So he might need influence in as an example, uh, other functions that he is not being able to get the support he needs, right?
So I have to step in and see how do I help facilitate that. He or she needs, for example, to justify more resources, right? Like we are having a new product launch. We have to hire people, train people. So how do I help get that step ahead? And another element is also funneling to he or she, critical information.
I might have access to information that. He or she don’t have. So how do I feed that and say, are you looking to these aspects? These things are evolving. There’s a new program in corporate, you can take advantage, right? It’s allowing that and. I’m gonna say above all listening, right? Because sometimes we as a leaders have a lot to say, but we need to also pause and be open to listen to their feedback, right?
So we can also adjust what we are doing, right, as a leaders, because it has to be a two-way avenue, right? This relationship, I would say.
[00:22:55] Rodney Apple: Absolutely. That’s, you have to, yeah. Listening. I’m glad. I’m so glad you brought that up. As leaders, it’s important to to listen. A lot of the greatest ideas can come from that shop floor.
Those that are out there on the line and assembling the product, and they see a lot. They see where the issues or opportunities are at.
[00:23:13] Fabio Paniza: I agree.
[00:23:14] Rodney Apple: So Fabi, I would love to hear your perspective on continuous improvement. I know that’s typically a big aspect of any manufacturing operations, and I would say broader across not just manufacturing, but across the supply chain and even other functions.
Another thing I’d like to touch on too, and sometimes these go hand in hand, is capital projects and that that goes back to staying on top of the day to day. But being able to flex and stay on top of strategic products, whether they’re CapEx or continuous improvement initiatives, and you certainly have a lot of good experience and larger transformations too.
So maybe just share a little bit with our audience to speak to those dynamics. I.
[00:23:52] Fabio Paniza: Yes. No, that’s really important. So the lean principles for process improvement, and I was, I would say, brought on early my career into the total quality system. So I grew up in this environment. So I think there is two ways to approach the process improvement.
You, you have large, impactful, bold ideas. And you need them, right? Because the market usually is being transformed by these bold ideas, so you can’t be behind the curve. Then there is the everyday small improvements that you and your team can do. Right now, I truly believe in the, one of the techniques is the brainstorming, the value stream mapping.
There are a lot of tools that can really enable you ideas to be successful and to continue becoming. Either, I would say increase your quality or safety, or to reduce your cost. I really, I would say, recommend people to read about this because there are really different techniques to get there, right? So brainstorming for me is a very important one.
Fishbone, right? Pareto. Uh, you look the 80 20 rule, doing a value stream mapping. Understand what is your end-to-end capacity? Can you really understand where are the bottlenecks? And trying to enable, I would say, a culture of process improvement, right? Because people in the day to day people who are producing the product, I would say are the best.
People that can provide those insights. So how do you motivate them to bring these ideas to the organization? How do you keep them motivated when they bring an idea, but we were not able to execute, right? So we don’t wanna people to say, it’s my third time I bring this idea. My idea was not accepted and say, no, let’s keep doing right.
We’ll get there. So keeping that environment where we embrace the new ideas we embrace to fail, because we might try an idea, it doesn’t work, then we try another idea. And I would say empowerment is another word that you can use in this process, right? Don’t, the leader shouldn’t be trying to transform everything by himself or herself.
It’s really how do you empower your team to feel that they have the ability to do that? So what do they need? Do they want money, time, resources, right? Like how do we give them the tools? So they feel empowered and accountable for the change. So in my view, the change that comes bottom up is much more meaningful than the top down.
So that for me is the first step to lean, is to change people’s minds. So then they will change the business, right? In the other hand. Now
[00:26:35] Rodney Apple: that is golden. What you just covered there. To get it to a place where you have these high performing teams and that culture of continuous improvement, that’s what really gets the glue going and it makes everything stick and it gets to that sustainable state where everybody’s involved.
[00:26:56] Fabio Paniza: No, I agree. I agree. And it’s a process. You can’t rush into that. There’s a certain pace that you need to enable the team to mature, right? So I can, you can’t go to a place and say, in a month you’re gonna be there. No. It’s the things you start doing as a team that you create the connections and evolve.
And then to your second question, when we talk about the strategic element and the capital investment. Yes. So I, I try to tell people that we have to be bold. In a large corporation, being bold is critical, right? And the boldness can come from, can you really get alignment between commercial r and d operations, quality and engineering and safety with an idea that can transform the business?
So this is where for me, the boat can come is to get everybody together. And I had a chance to work in a very large project, global by nature. We were looking to cut the number of products by 50% because the way we produced the product was different. So we have like almost similar applications for the same product, but we needed to align across the regions because us.
Had the preference. Latin America had another one, EMEA had another one. And that create a proliferation of codes we need to, bro, to bring everybody to the table and design what we would believe will be our global code. And that was a very bold project. Millions of investments, but more importantly. The objective was aligned across the organization and with the customers in mind, and that for me was the biggest challenge for us is to really align everybody so we could move into the same direction and commit financially to a large investment that would be a five year program, as an example,
[00:28:55] Rodney Apple: very.
Exciting, but also challenging.
[00:29:00] Mike Ogle: During this short break. We recognize that this podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm. Visit SCM talent [email protected].
[00:29:16] Rodney Apple: And I think that leads into our next question, so I’d love to hear in a role like yours, are those common challenges that you’re gonna come across, right? That you have to deal with challenges? I like to use the word opportunities as well.
[00:29:29] Fabio Paniza: Yes. Yes. Important skill is time management. So can you really assign and dedicate the right time?
Right? Because in a, in our operations role, we are gonna receive a lot of curve balls all the day. So. You have to find a way that you address the curve balls, but you are not doing that all day, right? So keep your strategic element dedicated the time so you can continue developing your team and, and secure that your team is developing their teams.
So for me, people development is the best investment to get a solid supply chain, right? But what will happen in, I would say in our day-to-day is going to be, for example, supply chain disruptions. A supplier may have had an issue, a plant caught on fire, they lost material, they lost equipment. So now you have to think about how do we help them stand up quickly if we don’t have an alternative supplier, a dual source, right?
How are we gonna. Supply the customers maybe with an alternative product. So it’s enabling a flexibility in your supply chain to react to this, right? So it is definitely one of the day-to-day things you’re gonna see. You may not have planned for that, and then by Mayo comes and you have to work on that, right?
Another day-to-day opportunity can be commercial, comes back and says, my forecast increased by 30%. So now you need to hire people, pro train people, acquire more materials, secure that your equipment has enough capacity, do you need to build another shift? Right? These are also parts of, I would say, our day to day and in our case specifically is very interesting because we are also receiving customers into our plant, and which is a great opportunity for us to listen direct feedback from them.
But it became part of our culture as well, right? Sometimes it’s two times a week, they will come. We have a very engaged team that is our tour leaders, right? Where we have a way to go through the manufacturing process, explain to them what we build, the quality, we put the love that is put into our products, right?
The experience of our team, because we are trying to show to our customers that this is not just a product, right? It is more than that. They are receiving really a is the result of a high talented team that is pursuing quality every day in what they do. Right. I. Then they can serve their customers with that product and have confidence that we’ll have the right output.
[00:32:09] Rodney Apple: That was perfect. You brought back some memories too, when we have candidates back in my days of recruitment and on the corporate side of getting out in the factories and going on the tours and putting on the hard hat, safety goggles and steel toe shoes and all that fun stuff. Yes. Yeah. And then would love to hear, you’ve touched on this already a little bit, Fabio, what gets you up and motivated and excited to come back to work daily?
What do you enjoy most about this role?
[00:32:36] Fabio Paniza: I would say by far people, right. And again, I’m very blessed that where I work, and I work in many companies within the same cooperation, but wherever I go, our people are bonded by the Credle, which is our customer and how we serve our customers, our employees, our community, and our stakeholders.
I want to give you an example where we saw the needs to increase the computer skills, knowledge of some of our employees. You think today that everybody has enough computer skills? There is a generation that is not there yet, right? So they came after and we challenged this team to go back to college and do a, a semester of computer skills.
And we had more than 20 people graduating in this course this week. So I was very proud of that, right? That people, uh, stood up to say that we are open to learn and we are open to become better. Employees for our customers, and they challenged themselves to that. And I know it was not easy, right? They had to ice a week, be driving to a college, getting home late, right?
Studying, doing homework, right at the phase of their lives that maybe they, they thought this was behind, but they were very successful and they completed that, right? So for me, developing people and seeing that coming through is very rewarding. I would say more than anything I.
[00:34:06] Rodney Apple: Love it. Love hearing those stories.
As we wind down today, I would love to hear, this is gonna be a forward thinking question. You get to this level, you’re managing one facility. The next thing you know you’re managing multi-site and you also have this field services organization too, but where. What are the common career paths that you see folks go to from a role like this where you’re multi-site for a division of a large corporation conglomerate, if you will.
I, I know I have some thoughts on it, but I’d love to hear yours.
[00:34:37] Fabio Paniza: Yeah, so I would say, and again, where I work, they embrace the, let’s say, people’s career, like you own your career. So I would say I, I really have, I would say I feel. Empower to drive my career where I see fit and I’ll have support from my leadership.
If I look, then maybe the natural progression is either I’m gonna go and you can pursue a larger site. Right? And we do have like sites that have 800, a thousand employees. Another career opportunity could be, we call the value stream leads, which are the roles that are. Connecting supply chain with commercial r and d and marketing.
So they’re really looking strategically the next three to five years of growth, innovation, manufacturing, right? Where we’re going to produce. And there’s also large roles in what we call the demand plan, where these are the leaders who are working with our, I’m gonna say sales team, to actually distributing the products into the hospitals, right?
So they are. Enabling that production and let’s say signal from the customers to produce and to distribute. And there’s another organization that I haven’t worked directly, which we call Deliver. And the Deliver is responsible for the finished goods, warehouse and distribution and the supply chain across the globe, right?
So there, there are many, I would say career path options because the company is so large that it creates a lot of more areas, right? For the future.
[00:36:19] Rodney Apple: Well, that’s wonderful and I love your statement. You have to own your own career. I’ve always said if you don’t, if you don’t own your career, someone else can own it for you.
And so you don’t want that to happen. Be the CEO of your own career and understand what are those opportunities and get those stakeholders and leaders involved to help you get there. And companies too that are, for lack of a better term, I’ll use progressive when it comes to talent development, and those are the ones that have the best.
When you think about employee engagement, job satisfaction, you do those 360 Pulse. It’s, they support the employees and they support where they want to go, and, and that’s where, that’s where you want to be. Um, I’ve certainly seen plenty of companies that are the opposite. They’ll get a little bit selfish and hoard people and they don’t like for them to leave to go other places.
And within the company. Yes.
[00:37:09] Fabio Paniza: Yes. I, what I like to tell to my team is. I have no issue if they are applying and progressing because again, moving the talent also enables a level of collaborations, right? Because imagine that there are many things that our companies can share in knowledge, and when they move, they bring the good, right?
And they share the good ideas and the good processes. So the more people move. The better we become as an organization, right? Because we are now disseminating the best of us, right? Between our processes. So I would say we enforce and we believe that’s part of a career, right? That you. If you want, we will enable.
Like in my case, I, I was again blessed with the opportunity to have an international assignment where I moved from Brazil to US and then I was blessed with the opportunity to stay in the US Right. The company really invest in the talent development and giving the opportunities so people can pursue their careers.
Yeah.
[00:38:12] Rodney Apple: Amazing. And that that’s the power too, of diversity means a lot of things. But the way you just described, I like to think of that’s that diversity of thought, and you get that by moving people around and embracing where they want to go in their careers, and it just ultimately makes the, the overall company stronger.
The last question I have, is there anything you’d like to share with our, our audience in particular, those that are pursuing the same career path that you’ve gone down in, in the type of role that you’re in now as a director of operations?
[00:38:44] Fabio Paniza: Again, if you have, um, if you believe that you can make a difference, right?
And if you enjoy seeing what you can produce. Which today could be a product, could be a software, right? Like supply chain is evolving, right? We are now supplying software into the markets, right? Not only products and if you are okay that you’re gonna make some mistakes, it’s part of what we do. We have to really like move, right?
It’s progress, not perfection. I would say so. And if you enjoy working with other people that have different functions, different roles. Supply chain has a lot of opportunity for a lot of people, I would say, and, and you can have a very fulfilled career and life, right? Because I, I think both walk hand in hand.
Your personal life and your professional life feed from each other, right? Happy people tends to have good careers and good careers may drive happy people. Right? Find what you love. More importantly, but be open to learn new things that would, you might, there might be a passion there that you don’t know.
Right? Be exposed, right. Go visit, go see. Right. Talk to people so you can build a sense of where do you wanna go. Right. So, uh, for me again, operations and supply chain has been extremely, I would say, uh, satisfying. And, and I hope that I can help other people fulfill what they want from their lives as well.
I.
[00:40:12] Rodney Apple: Excellent. That’s outstanding advice and I really do appreciate you sharing that. So, Fabio, it has been a pleasure having you on the Supply Chain Careers podcast today. Thank you so much for sharing your unique career journey with our audience, all the different accolades and nuggets of wisdom. This has been a wonderful episode.
I know our audience will gain a lot of value from it, so thank you again.
[00:40:34] Fabio Paniza: Oh, thank you for having me, Rodney, and continuous success on this podcast. I have been able to listen to many great talent and knowledge that you are sharing here, so I’m very appreciative of giving me this opportunity as well.
[00:40:46] Rodney Apple: Thank you so much. We appreciate it. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, please take a moment to leave as a review. Wherever you consume your podcast, whether it be Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or elsewhere, truly helps others discover valuable insights for their careers. And don’t forget to share this episode if you think of any colleagues or peers or anyone else you know that could benefit from hearing this.
[00:41:10] Mike Ogle: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Supply Chain Careers podcast. Be sure to listen to other episodes and sign up to be notified when future episodes are released as we continue to interview industry leading supply chain experts. This podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm.
Visit SCM Talent [email protected].
