The Evolution of the Enterprise Chief Supply Chain Officer - Part 1: The Role Redefined

In 2024 we examined how the modern CSCO had evolved. Two years on, we spoke with five current and former Chief Supply Chain Officers whose careers span beauty, consumer products, food and ingredients, aerospace, packaging, and diversified industrials. With the operating environment more fragmented and increasingly volatile, we returned to the people in the seat with a sharper question: in a world of blurring functional lines and localizing supply chains, does the integrated enterprise CSCO role endure? The perspectives varied. The through-line did not: the role is being redefined, not retired.

From optimizing the parts to understanding the system

For decades, organizations optimized the individual parts of the supply chain, building highly capable functions such as procurement, planning, manufacturing, and logistics, inside systems that grew steadily more complex. The result, as Torsten Pilz, former CSCO at Honeywell and 3M, describes it, is a paradox. 

The leadership challenge today is less about optimizing any one component than understanding how the components interact. A sourcing decision can ripple through manufacturing, inventory, customer service, working capital, and ultimately growth. That, Torsten argues, “requires a systems engineering perspective, and nobody’s trained for that.”

None of this diminishes the fundamentals. Graeme Carter, Global CSCO at Coty, is emphatic that the core discipline still matters. Supply chain leaders “still need the numeracy and discipline to balance competing priorities across service, savings, stock and sustainability.” If anything, as leaders take on a wider scope up and down the value chain, deep expertise in the core areas becomes more important, not less. Christina Slaughter, CSCO at Stanley 1913, puts the case for hard-won breadth simply. 

The center holds, even as the edges localize

At first glance, localization looks like a threat to the enterprise role. If manufacturing, sourcing and decision-making are moving closer to markets, why keep a C-level leader to integrate the whole? Peter Anderson, former CSCO at Cummins and WestRock, acknowledges the possibility directly. 

Yet localization does not necessarily eliminate the need for enterprise coordination. The forces driving it are themselves global in nature. Tariffs are redrawing North American sourcing, energy costs and tightening regulation are reshaping European footprints, and “China-plus-one” diversification is pushing capacity across South and Southeast Asia and back toward Mexico and Eastern Europe. 

Managing that reconfiguration is not a regional task; it is an enterprise one. Decentralization without coordination simply recreates cost and duplication. Christina saw it firsthand. “We had two different supply chains for two companies making the same thing, in the same factory… it shows you why you need that central oversight.”

Graeme’s version is similarly crisp. “Simple, standard, central where you can create affordable scale. Regional where essential.” The enterprise CSCO no longer needs to direct every decision. The role is to define the standards, capabilities and connections that allow a more distributed organization to operate as one.

Risk moves inside the operating model

Before the pandemic, business continuity and risk could be treated as specialist capabilities sitting just outside the core. 

Today they are central to supply chain strategy. At Stanley 1913, Christina describes building a dedicated risk capability with subject-matter experts across functions and a playbook designed to anticipate disruption. More tellingly, risk moved from a “nice to have” to an integral part of the team.

Cyber has sharpened the point. A ransomware attack on a supplier or a logistics network can now halt production as effectively as a factory fire, making cyber exposure a supply chain concern as much as an IT one. The leadership challenge is translating that exposure into terms a board understands: dollars, brand impact, and time. 

Technology compounds both the challenge and the advantage. AI is increasingly dissolving the boundaries between traditional end-to-end processes, but as Peter cautions, “the tools are only as good as the question you ask.” The differentiator is therefore less access to data than the judgment to frame the right question and understand what the answer means.

From cost center to growth engine

For most of its history, supply chain leadership meant efficiency, cost and reliability. Those still matter, but where physical capacity constrains revenue, supply chain now shapes how fast a company can grow. In sectors where capacity is the binding constraint, Torsten observes that a strong supply chain leader becomes a direct catalyst for growth. He captures the change with a story. “It used to be when you’d tell somebody you’re the supply chain guy and they’d just yawn at you. Now people ask you if you have a job for their kids.”

Kim calls it “the big supply chain rebrand. Supply chain being not just the cost saver, but actually the growth enabler.” The leaders who make that leap, she argues, learn to “speak the business language, not just the supply chain language,” translating operations into revenue, margin, capital, risk and customer impact. Which raises the question that followed nearly every leader we spoke with: if the role now demands this much more, does the traditional path into it still produce the leaders it needs?

In Part II, we explore the question of how the next generation of supply chain leaders should be developed, the reskilling the wider organization will require, and what companies must do deliberately to build the leaders this moment demands.

Our thanks to the five supply chain leaders who generously shared their experience and perspectives for this article: Peter Anderson, independent advisor and former CSCO at Cummins and WestRock; Graeme Carter, Global Chief Supply Chain Officer at Coty; Kim Faulkner, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Tate & Lyle; Torsten Pilz, CEO and President of Counterpoint Labs, and former CSCO at Honeywell and 3M; and Christina Slaughter, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Stanley 1913. 

A special thanks to Utsav Subramani for his support in researching this piece, and Caroline Van Meerbeeck for her writing support.

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