Hello, this is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Anne Mazinga.

And I'm Chris Walton.

And we are coming to you live from the podcast studio at Manifest 2025.

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Chris and I are very excited because we have another wonderful guest for you.

We have one of the speakers here at Manifest.

We have Berger Bushing, the head of supply chain for North America and personal health at Philips.

Berger, welcome.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you.

How's the show been going for you so far?

Great.

It's a little bit overwhelming sometimes.

It's your first time here, right?

It's my first time here and it's actually first time in five or six years that I have been to a conference with all the things going on in supply chain.

So it's inspiring on one hand, but it's also a little bit overwhelming on the other.

Yeah, I'm sure.

Well, tell the audience a little bit about your role at Philips and everything that you cover.

What's been keeping you so busy for the last five years.

Yeah, I mean, supply chain came at the forefront of many things over the last few years.

A little bit.

Yeah, just a little bit.

But it makes it exciting.

I love that, I really do.

And a conference like this is kind of a little bit of a sanity check.

You're realizing it's not only yourself having these challenges.

So there are others as well.

To my role at Philips, I'm leading the, what we call the region supply chain, the downstream supply chain, customer facing supply chain for the personal health space business at Philips.

So when I talk Philips, please don't think about light bulbs, TVs.

I love those things though.

Great products.

The brand is still out there.

However, we really transformed the company towards a health tech company.

Within that company is a division called Personal Health, which is the consumer side of Philips.

So you can think of brands like Sonicare toothbrushes.

That's what I thought of first actually.

Royal crochet boots.

Baby bottles.

You still have baby bottles, Evan?

Baby bottles.

Baby bottles, yes.

Yeah.

And that's, that's what we do.

Yeah.

And in supply chain we are there to enable that business and we had quite a few learnings over the last few years.

So we are a little bit on a journey how we reinvent our supply chain.

Create a global integrated supply chain.

And I have the privilege to be part of a global leadership team that's trying to pull that off.

Wow.

And are there new categories that you're exploring within that personal health tech space that you are in charge of sourcing or looking at or anything like that?

We're pretty set right now on the categories.

The all care, the personal care, and the baby, mother and child care, which is also being expanded to maternal health, but we're sticking to those three categories.

Interesting.

Okay.

All right.

So.

So Ann said you're speaking at the conference.

Have you spoken yet?

Yes.

You did?

I was on this morning.

You're on this morning.

Okay.

All right.

What did you talk about?

So I was on a panel with a few other people around transformation and change management.

Pretty stimulating.

It's good to really exchange a little bit your thoughts with other leaders that are in similar situations.

Yeah.

And that's what we talked about.

And what was it that you were hoping the audience took away from your participation today, like when you were coming into manifest?

What do you really want to tell them?

Yeah, so I think there are a few things.

One is, I think when you lead larger change initiatives in supply chain or anywhere else, I think you have to be very intentional and deliberate about how you go about it.

So a very professional approach to change management is certainly one element, and that's also what the others shared.

The other one is, especially in supply chain, we really want to remind ourselves what we are here for, what are we really solving for?

And I talk quite a bit about the coherence in your strategic thinking that you need to have together with your commercial teams.

So you need to be fairly logical and consistent actually how you compete in the market before you actually develop the supply chain strategies that you ultimately want to implement.

And having that in depth conversation with the commercial teams and understanding that and really being on the same page with them, I think it's a really important thing because ultimately that's what we do in supply chain.

We are enabling a larger business and we want to support our main customers.

Is there an example you can share that sheds light on exactly what you mean?

I'm curious.

Yeah.

So, for instance, we have one strategic pillar within our north where we talk about a customer centered supply chain.

Sounds great, huh?

Who doesn't?

In a lot of ways, right?

Exactly, exactly.

But then when you really.

You start talking about a few scenarios, okay, where do I need to manufacture, how close do I need to be to my customers, where do my distribution centers need to be?

And when you have to make these trade off decisions.

At the end of the day, you need to be, we call them even over conversations.

Even over.

Okay.

You always want to solve for quality, speed and cost in supply chain, but something has to give sometimes.

And you really have to understand deeply how you compete in the market in order to make those decisions.

And having that understanding together with your commercial teams, I think is really important before you make these decisions.

And that's only we figured out as we went.

While we have that ambition to become more customer centric in our approach, when you really ultimately make these trade off decisions, you want to have that aligned.

Yeah.

Birger, if you look back on the last couple years that you've been heads down working on optimizing the supply chain, creating a customer centric supply chain, what are the things that you're most proud of or do you have any examples of kind of how you put that into practice that you'd share?

Yeah, there are quite a few.

So we have now about two years into our journey of creating this end to end global supply chain for the personal health business.

And so there are about 21 strategic change initiatives.

Last year was a big year, especially on the planning side.

So we call this next generation integrated planning, where we move entire planning teams, demand planning, supply planning, all on one platform.

And life as a demand planner or supply planner is already very difficult in these days.

Yes.

On top of this, you have to manage a transition like that.

And the team was really great.

I'm really proud of the team, how they managed, how they came together as a global supply chain or planning community, and how we managed without any major glitches towards our customers or anything like that?

And do you attribute that to any technology investments that you made or how were you able to be better demand planners?

So ultimately, it's actually about making their life easier.

So right now, not only that, it's challenging for them with the regular challenges of being a planner, but we made their life really difficult by having to navigate four different platforms and systems.

So we moved to one integrated platform by one provider and made that change.

So big software investment.

Yes, very big software in their investments, but should make their life easier.

The verdict is still out there a little bit given we are three months in, but so far we are pretty happy.

We're pretty happy.

All right, so that's what you did.

What are you looking to do next?

What's your plans for 2025?

What are you hoping to implement or change?

Yeah, we will definitely continue our journey around this North Star.

We call Them five pillars.

And the last two years was also a lot going back to basics.

We heard that a lot.

We've heard that a lot at this conference already.

We all learned our lessons, I think.

Is that why?

Because you learned the lessons coming out.

Of the pandemic particularly, I think triggered that a lot.

And so like, what lessons did you learn?

Yeah, almost.

Almost all the things you measure us on were out of sync.

From being reliable in service to our main customers, being more cost competitive.

And by the way, we had way too much inventory.

So all these things were out of sync.

So we put a lot of effort behind getting what we call getting back into flow.

Just the basic blocking and tackling of running a supply chain.

I think that we got into a much better spot over the last two years.

So we're happy with that.

However, I think you can expand that concept.

And I like to usually think, when I think of a supply chain, I like to think from source to shelf.

So the next step is really how do you bring your key retail customers, how do you bring your suppliers and three PLs into this synchronized thinking, especially on the customer side?

We're working with the major retailers in the U.S.

we have a dedicated team that just works on customer collaboration.

And how do we partner together more on ultimately protecting the shelf?

Collaborative forecasting, collaboration around order management, fulfillment, logistics optimization.

Those kind of things are really the ones that we want to take to the next level this year.

How do you think?

One thing that we haven't really talked about in this conversation, I'm curious to get your thoughts on here, is how do you think about the direct to consumer nature of the business?

Like, is that something you spend your time on a lot?

A little bit, not as much.

Are you more.

More focused on kind of the traditional wholesaler relationships?

We do have some direct to consumer business, but it's rather small.

I think when you compete in our categories, you go for the larger size baskets.

So while we do have an online business, it's a smaller portion and strategically we are more focused on the retail.

Retail business.

So it really is blocking and tackling.

Getting down to basics for you this year, Braker.

I'm curious, when we think about, you mentioned your store partners, are there technologies that are here on display at Manifest or even that you're looking into as a manufacturer, as a product maker that you think will help keep that line of connection open better between you and your wholesale partners?

Yeah, I think there are a few.

So when I first look at just us as a company, of course, if I Just judge by the number of emails I'm getting, it's probably it has to be to do something with AI or generative AI.

Sure, sure.

That will definitely be a game changer in the industry.

You can't ignore that.

For us specifically, I think I just talked about the planning integration.

So we are really rich in data.

How do you turn data into insights and real time decisions?

So for us it's, I think a lot is about augmented decision making and how we have technology help making in the moment decisions with the information you have.

And then another element is we're still running fairly long global supply chains.

So having end to end visibility of where your inventory is is one.

And I think that's also one you would expand to your customers that you really connect your supply chain from source to shelf when it comes to end to end visibility.

Got it.

So kind of that next best action idea, like using technology to inform the next best action that you should take as you're working through all your different processes.

Correct.

Yeah.

Okay.

Awesome.

Well, thanks man.

Thanks for coming by and stopping by and chatting with us.

Thanks to TGW for making all of our coverage at this show possible.

And until next time, man, be careful out there.