A run away from academics is now a Supply Chain Leader
Yesterday I had the pleasure to catch up with Gabriel Stockler, Chairman Advisor & Head of Innovation at CDP (Companhia DPaschoal de Participações) and former Head of Supply Chain Enablement Latin America for Henkel.
With these titles and executive positions at multinational companies you would think Gabriel has spent his whole adult life focused on logistics, but Gabriel jumped right into the start of our conversation saying –
“At the end of the day logistics is not my specialty. I have a major in physics and electrical engineering. I love people — this is the statement of my life. I love to work with people and collaborate with people… this is the thing that I really love to do. Because of this I didn’t want to follow my academic career and I ended up working at DPaschoal right out of school because I knew I’d get more fulfillment from collaborating with people.
What accomplishment in your logistics career are you most proud of?
At Henkel I led a project where I had to onboard an M&A of 64 people in one month, across four countries (Brasil, Argentina, Chile and Peru), with a small team of four.
I had to onboard all of the operations, all the foreign trade, customer service, logistics, and supply planning. I had to introduce 250 new finished goods into our factories and warehouses.
I only had one month to make this happen and my boss at that time called me up and said “Gabriel… I need you to do this… I rely on you”
This integration was the winner of the Global Henkel Lions Award prize as the most collaborative initiative in the year.
I’m very proud of this!
As Gabriel explained this accomplishment to me, he shared his screen and showed me the presentation he used inside Henkel. This was the opening slide of the M&A onboarding project.
How do you think Covid-19 affects logistics in LatAm?
Covid is speeding up a lot of supply chain and innovation initiatives. We’ve recently created an automotive aftermarket platform. We strongly believe this market needs a collaborative approach. The players in this market need to be together on a platform in order to improve the supply chain. I know it sounds strange, but there needs to be shared inventory among competitors.
There’s no data. Factories don’t have numbers and no predictions on what to produce. Our platform will show the information of the consumer directly to the factory.
We want to empower the factory to lead the supply chain in this market.
In fact, Gabriel and his team have already launched a first version of this ecosystem platform, Autopecas, and are working with several distributors and auto shops including competitors.
Brazil has many logistics startups delivering food, transporting people, and delivering e-commerce on motorcycles and trucks. What is one company that stands out to you, and why?
As a customer I’m very impressed with Zé Delivery! This product was built by AB Inbev. They put together all the restaurants that are closing because of the pandemic and all of these restaurants are now small warehouses on the platform. If you want to drink a beer or a soda, you just put this into the mobile app and 10 minutes later you get it delivered to your house. It’s unbelievable! They only launched this product a few months ago, and now in Brazil “it’s the fever” [it’s hot!].
For someone who thinks that logistics isn’t his specialty, Gabriel can really go deep on many different logistics topics within one hour. He spent most of the conversation sharing his screen and going over past logistics analysis he’s built from scratch. Some other topics I didn’t include in this article was a Distribution Center efficiency dashboard and he also showed me a productivity tool he created to manage his logistics team.
A couple topics that could easily have made the conversation run dry, but Gabriel’s high energy and enthusiasm for his work and collaboration with people is really infectious. He’s definitely a people person and I can understand why this is the statement of his life.
