suppliers and innovate with what was available in the market. About three years later we started to set up our corporate pur- chasing organization and strategic sourcing, an idea originating from the Boston Consulting Group to leverage our cost position and further develop the supply base on a global scale. Our ambition was to develop a manufacturing base in the Far East that could supply the entire world and simultaneously develop the Asian market for elevators which at that time was starting to boom. I was offered a job in corporate purchasing in Lucerne although my function turned out to be much more than just strategic purchasing. We also set about optimizing the manufacturing footprint for the Schindler Group which involved much strate- gic discussion as we created a framework for suppliers.”
And then you moved to the Far East?
“Schindler had a joint venture in China and I had been respon- sible for all the mechanics, the category management of doors and car and afterwards for all mechanical parts. I had been travelling there quite regularly and felt comfortable there, even though the joint venture was not all that successful. I asked my boss if I could go to China to set up our own Green- field site. He said no but I persuaded him anyway. And so I moved with the family to China. However, even though it was the right moment for our family life it was not the right time professionally. I was not successful in that job because I was not experienced or mature enough to get the Greenfield project off the ground and the company was also not ready for it.”
Y ou make a decision but it didn ’t work out as you ’d hoped. Did 14
that impact your confidence? “Definitely! At first I took it quite badly. I had built up a good reputation as someone with talent, someone to watch etc and now I was losing ground. I sat with my manager and I decided that I didn’t want to move out of Asia; if Schindler wanted me to go back to Europe then I would have to go somewhere else. My husband had the chance to move to Singapore so we moved there and I left the company. It gave me time to think; Singapore is a small network and one of our Schindler suppliers, Sematic, approached me and asked about setting up a Greenfield site in Asia. It was a small fam- ily Italian company that was willing to invest but not willing to engage. I became their consultant for 7-8 months, doing all the research I needed and came up with a business plan for open- ing a factory in China. They gave me the money to go ahead, we built the factory, had an office in Hong Kong, I hired people and I ran the supply chain. Within three years we broke even in China and we developed a business that was worth hundreds of millions. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do a Green-
Sabine Simeon-Aissaoui: “Data analists don’t do excel files or dashboards. They don’t talk about KPIs but instead how to get intelligence out of the data. It requires a completely different mindset.”
SUPPLY CHAIN MOVEMENT, No.29, Q2 2018
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