Azukaego Chukwuelue, leading commercial and supply chain strategy is her thing

Azukaego Chukwuelue is a certified professional with a wealth of commercial experience spanning over two decades in West, East and Central Africa. Over the course of her 22-year career, she led commercial and supply chain strategy and operations in Cadbury, Kraft foods, Mondelez International, Pfizer (later Neimeth) and, most recently, Kimberly-Clark as Supply Chain Director.

Azukaego is the Managing Director of Truss Ugavi Nigeria Limited, where she focuses on ensuring visibility in the supply chain with the objective to enable trade and ease of doing business in the African region, building capacity in the industry to enable MSME’s thrive while getting young people productively engaged in every area of the supply chain. She also serves as a Consultant with Africa Resource Centre (ARC_ESM) where she contributes her quota to achieve equitable access to medicines and healthcare in Nigeria

She earned her bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from the University of Ibadan and Executive MBA in General Management & doing business in Africa from Pan African University (Lagos Business School) and Nanyang Business School, NTU, Singapore. She is an alumnus of the INSEAD Advanced Management Program.

Over the course of her 20-year career, which saw her work in four multinationals, she has gained versatility and depth working across different fields, including sales & marketing as well as supply chain. Her competencies span business revenue growth & profitability, strategic analysis, talent development, change management, as well as effective communications and relationship building skills. She is the go-to person for troubleshooting potential operational loopholes that span across forecasting and planning, customer relationship management, distributor management dynamics, RTM & Channel development strategies, logistics & distributions cost models, efficient procure to pay models, warehousing, import, and export operations including international logistics, and supply network design amongst others.

Beyond her work, she mentors young women, with the aim of ensuring that all women have the skills and capabilities to earn a seat at the table on merit. Her passion for mentorship comes from personal experiences where, for a good part of her career, she was the only female in the room and was successful via leaders, peers and subordinates who gave their time and resources to mentor her.

She does this through Truss Empowerment Foundation, a non-profit focused on creating real value for young people via enhancing their economic power by building capabilities that allow successful engagement in stereotyped as well as leadership roles.

What memories of childhood would you want to share with us?

I was raised in a home where the expectations have always been set quite high. The motto has always been ‘what is worth doing is worth doing well’, so it’s either you do excellently or you don’t start.

My mum trained as a nurse in Germany in the 70’s and returned to Nigeria to join the military, little wonder discipline was a given in our home.

My mum raised us to see our disadvantages as opportunities for innovation and growth. Most importantly, we were raised as staunch Catholics, putting God first in every endeavour and knowing that the father was always with us.

She encouraged us to think outside the box and always look for a way when the odds seemed stacked against us.

She had a personal goal to give us the best education at any cost, she ensured we had all the advantages a good education would enable. This influenced my attitude to work and outlook to life.

I also had very strong support from my only brother who is a General today, knowing my big brother had my back all through gave me confidence to climb every mountain.

Interestingly, while I fought back at the tough standards set, I am exactly the same way today and I am amused when this is raised by my kids or team.

What is your experience leading commercial and supply chain strategy and operations at Kimberly-Clark as Supply Chain Director?

At the time I joined Kimberly Clark, the organisation was still very new and the supply chain functions were still going through a lot of transition. My predecessor had set up the organisation and I was tasked with embedding and standardising the processes as well as ensuring an optimal supply chain function that could meet the demands of a dynamic business in a new market. There had to be some level of pioneering as the business was relatively new to the Nigerian market driving many innovative methods to drive seamless execution, which involved adapting the global standards to enable execution in the local context. It was key to infuse local contents and insights into the processes so as to avoid and reduce waste.

One area was building government relations with agencies, introducing Kimberly Clark as a well recognised corporate entity and bringing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into the country. This gave the company the recognition from relevant government agencies as a legal corporate entity posited to do business the right way.

Another area was building capability for the dynamic nature of the job in West, East and Central African markets¸ and the very different nuances in the different regions. This involved ensuring one sourced the right talent that could function in a very technical field in a dynamic, volatile and complex market.

It was even more critical as we were landing a multi-million dollar brownfield project, a world class state of the art mill in the midst of the pandemic – already a complex endeavour made even more complex by the pandemic. It was a period of continuous learning and unlearning, lots of iterations, adapting to change over and over again.

Two very marked memories for me in Kimberly Clark was the very volatile period were we had to land the factory under very dire conditions in the pandemic, coupled with route to market changes and new ways of working due to the lockdowns as well as an increase in demand, meaning we had to import significant monthly volumes to support the base business while sourcing equipment all around the world to land the plant.

The team did successfully, growing business numbers and interestingly, we were a 70% female supply chain function, lending credence to the importance and relevance of diversity.

This was no easy feat as it involved using tactical methods but ensuring flexibility and agility, leveraging the support of everyone in the business to secure the investment and ensuring the mill started within the timeline.

While Cadbury gave me a platform to learn, build capability and deploy same in an environment that is controlled, Kimberly gave me a platform to test my learning and experiences in continuous accelerating motion.

Multinational companies and large organisations however still have a lot of opportunities when it comes to doing business in Africa, some of which include: Backward Integration. One thing the pandemic has shown us is that we need to develop local resources and infrastructure to avoid disruption. The AfCFTA would further enable this. The second thing is to develop key government relations on policies and add value in improving the business environment because the government cannot do it all. The third thing is B2B collaboration as key to maximizing cost efficiencies and finally, the space of technology and the future of supply chain.

What is Truss Ugavi Nigeria Limited about?

Truss Ugavi Limited is a supply chain consulting firm founded in 2020 with a vision to provide optimal and simplified supply chain solutions, build capability, ensuring sustainable working systems enabled by people, data, technology, and innovation.

Ugavi focuses on capacity & capability building; delivers in-person and online training to new and existing businesses, multinationals, and government parastatals, recruiting role specific individuals with a good understanding of business goals and technical skills for their role and outsourcing to enable businesses focus on their strengths. We also engage in business process optimisation including planning, procurement, process improvement and change management. Furthermore, we also do cost synergies and total delivered costs – supporting businesses to meet up their profitability and growth goals and E2E logistics and supply chain solutions.

As a Consultant with Africa Resource Centre, how are you contributing your quota to achieving equitable access to medicines and healthcare in Nigeria?

ARC_ESM (Excellence in Supply Chain Management) is doing a lot of work to develop strategies and institutionalise processes that will enable availability of medicines and access to healthcare via an effective supply chain using its thought leadership, advisory, brokerage and COE ( capacity building) pillars.

My work revolves around supporting the state governments to identify the supply chain needs within the state and subsequently the diagnoses of what is required, adoption and application of frameworks and other supply chain tools/methodology, in line with best practices to improve the issues identified. It is a privilege to volunteer my technical skills as well as advisory support via experience and interactions I have gained working for two decades in the private sector where it is needed in our country/region.

What will you describe as the major challenges in the healthcare system of Nigeria and what solutions can you proffer?

In my view, the top 3 challenges will be under funding-(infrastructure & operational effectiveness, poor governance/management of resources and availability/retention of the current healthcare professionals.

Human resource brain drain in my view seems now to have overtaken service delivery issues arising from underfunding and bordering on poor Infrastructure and sub optimal planning, procurement, logistics, warehousing distribution and last mile delivery strategies.

What is the way forward?

Underfunding and governance/management are the underlying issues and multipliers for the other challenges. As such, this is a good first place to start. As a region, we must align with the WHO building blocks for adequate healthcare and engage in reforming and rigorous solutions/strategies including getting the private sector much more involved from both funding, governance and technical support.

A simple but effective approach that will ensure quick change outcomes will be, for example, limiting access to medical tourism for people with political offices.

What is your view on transformative leadership?

My view is such that, for those working around me to buy into the vision and work with me, they have to see me a role model who they can trust to get the job done, but also support their growth process. To do this, there must be room to also motivate them to commit to the vision of the organisation and inspire them to achieve success. This is achieved by continuously stimulating their intellect to allow for growth, capacity building, creativity and challenging the status quo. While dealing with the team, treating everyone as a part of the whole should be prioritised over relating to them on a collective level. Each person is put into consideration not only to achieve success for the company but also to achieve their personal goals.

This thought led to the implementation of the Truss Supply Chain Mastery – a technology-driven program that adopts the dynamics of learning through experience and business-related thinking and concepts beneficial to career growth and development. The program seeks to play a role in solving the problem of unemployment and underemployment due to the skills and capability gaps. It covers areas that develop business acumen, financial acumen, commercial awareness, and bravery for entrepreneurship and youths with the entrepreneurial and value adding skills desired in organisations, leadership opportunities for those stuck on the corporate ladder and entrepreneurship capability for business owners.

Tell us about leading commercial & supply chain strategy and operations in Cadbury, Kraft foods, Mondelez International, Pfizer (later Neimeth)

Commercial and supply chain operations meant long days and very short nights. It was a team that worked quietly but intensely to ensure that the wheels of the business continued to turn without breaks.

The only times when the team was noticed were period of disruption when things weren’t working right. FMCG being a very competitive space, meant speed to market and execution was vital and as such it meant working efficiently to ensure there were no disruptions in the route to market. It was exciting work with a large and very diverse and qualified team who put their heads together to break new barriers daily.

In what practical ways are you building capacity so that MSMEs can thrive?

Underperformance across the supply chain ecosystem in Nigeria is driven by poor system design, huge capability and competency gaps, poor governance and performance management. This added to the need for more clarity around regulatory requirements, lack of information, infrastructure, and standards as well as significant system fragmentation amongst other causes, has led to significant growth challenges for MSMEs, keeping over 70% at the micro level as growth to small and medium scale enterprises are stifled by these issues.

My organisation Truss Ugavi, seeks to use innovation to enable access to information and increase capacity, bringing together supply with demand real time in the slowing maturing logistics and supply chain landscape.

The objective is to enable huge information flow capability enabling cost synergies and allowing small business the headroom to specialize on their key strengths, while reducing the barriers of access to experts in the industry who can deliver operational solutions As A Service allowing for efficiency and cost competitiveness.

How are you getting young people productively engaged in every area of the supply chain?

During the pandemic, I made a personal pledge to focus on Knowledge sharing, simplifying and breaking down information and insights on all aspects of the supply chain into bite sized bits in language that was very coherent to non-supply chain professionals (supply chain professionals have a different language for everything). This became necessary as I frequently sat in interviews for supply chain professionals like demand planners, procurement managers, import and export specialists as well as logistics managers, and we would speak with several candidates and not get a fill for the role. Alarmed at the disconnect between the volume of unemployed youths and the inability to fill the available job roles, and having been a supply chain professional who has had the opportunity to go through several roles, where I learnt on the roles with no prior training, it became clear to me that something needed to be done to sensitise the supply chain to the youths.

The solution came by first establishing a relatable relationship between the supply chain functions in organisations and in the kitchen. I would usually equate the supply chain to what occurs in the kitchen from planning what the family would eat, to sourcing food items including cold chain items like meat and perishables like avocados. Then of course, focusing on several making options like baking, cooking, frying and so on. Now, storage after making is critical in the kitchen with varying forms of storage like refrigeration, ambient temperature storage and so on. How it is served ( distribution & logistics), quality, safety of the food, time of cooking and eating, insights from stakeholders who get to eat these meals as well as returns or recycling of food, are all functions that happen in the kitchen, same as in any supply chain.

The personal notes, calls for mentorship and mentions of how this has driven understanding and confidence across young professionals, as well those who are aspiring is an affirmation to the need for knowledge.

More importantly, there are over 100 young people who have reached out to say they considered a career in supply chain because of my write ups, while managers reach out to say the articles and conversations boosted their confidence as they realize the value of their contributions.

In my experience, the Nigerian youth when given the right platform, exposure and a glimpse of what is attainable, strives for greatness and performs excellently. This also led to the birth Truss Supply Chain Mastery. The Truss Supply Chain Mastery is a technology-driven program that adopts the dynamics of learning through experience and business-related thinking and concepts beneficial to career development and improvement. It highlights the interdependences and interrelatedness of the various units in an organization and the roles they play in ensuring that end-to-end business deliverables are attainable.

Through the simulation of real-world business scenarios and processes, participants will solve complicated business problems in small teams, enabled by a tech platform and led by a C-suite mentor who possesses a broad range of experience in supply chain across various sectors.

In what ways are you mentoring young girls?

Beyond my work, I mentor young ladies, and strongly believe all women should have the confidence to ask for a ’seat at the table’. Through Truss Empowerment Foundation, a non-profit, I actively work to empower women by enhancing their economic power through building capabilities that allow her successful engagement in gender-stereotyped roles.

I do this by first establishing a relation between the supply chain and their educational background. Also, I engage and provide them with relevant information to spike their excitement and to also see that having a resilient supply chain is a solution enabler for reoccurring issues posing various sectors. That way, they understand that there is a space for them to thrive in.

Personally, I have set myself a goal to see woman leading supply chain functions in organisations – my goal is to search out competitive female professionals and give the platform to be seen and heard.

I am an advocate of mentorship and strategic networking. I create and look for opportunities where I get to mentor, train, teach young girls on the supply chain, leadership, and overall self-improvement, directing and linking them up with opportunities, and also connecting them with other professionals who through their organisation and network can connect them to more opportunities.

The importance of mentorship cannot be overemphasised. The time and resources my peers and leaders offered to me, gave me a lift and helped to hone me into the leader I am today. Not only have I been passionate about consciously hiring more women into the supply chain space throughout my career, but I’ve also facilitated structured internship programmes where they can get practical experience because I want other women to see what is possible.

How can diversity and inclusion be advanced?

Diversity and inclusion are hot topics across industries today, with studies showing that organisations with a diverse and inclusive workforce are 35% more likely to have better financial returns than companies that don’t. Employees are now more selective about companies they choose to work for based on workplace culture and how diverse they are. I will choose the organisations I have worked for over and over again – they walk the talk. However, it is clear that no matter how many diversity seminars and studies are published, until organisations take actionable steps to build an inclusive workplace, the goal will be elusive – the people make a difference.

To use my own experiences as a focal point, seeing women in supply chain inspired and made me realize it was a career I could pursue. However, when I eventually got into the supply chain function after a company merger, it was the support and encouragement I received that made me stay through the challenges I faced as a newcomer in the industry. I went in wearing a commercial hat as an operations person focused on customer service so the first year was challenging. No meeting ended without me asking for the meaning of the acronyms that are a big part of supply chain talk. This led to self-doubt and often wondering if I made the right decision. But the women in my team constantly encouraged and supported me until I believed I could do it. They recognised what it meant to be working in a male-dominated role at the time and always reached out to encourage me.

The first female supply chain leader I had, influenced me greatly with her inspirational leadership style. She would often reach out to commend my performance and say, “You are doing great, Azuka. Focus on solving the problems—your best is good enough. Everything will fall into place.” Somehow, this would come when I thought I was doing the worst.

How did you rise above the challenges you experienced?

I rose above it by changing my perspective to focus on solving problems, she (the supply chain leader I mentioned earlier) taught me one significant lesson – every time you solve problems, you create value. And every time you create value, people want you in the room. As I focused on providing value, I deployed my sales experience to serve as an enabler and eased the friction between the sales and supply chain functions. I understood the commercial team’s problems: visibility was an issue, so I ensured visibility. I succeeded in creating a bridge that enabled visibility, clarity of issues and information between the sales and supply chain functions, and trust in a common goal was the basis.

The positive feedback gave me confidence in the sense that I was not a supply chain expert, but I was adding value. I learned from this experience that the customer is vital; when they are happy you have done your job.

My contributions helped me gain more acceptance from the supply chain team. People were then willing to support me in understanding the things I needed to know. By looking at this data, we focused on producing what was beneficial for the business. Because of these personal experiences in my career where I was often the only woman in the room or one of the few, I choose to challenge women’s lesser representation in critical roles and stereotypes that deny women opportunities to be the best. Seeing other women in the field and their constant encouragement made me trust in myself and my abilities.

What hurdle did you scale which you can’t forget easily?

One of the biggest challenges for me was running an MBA at Lagos Business School as a mother, a full career professional and having a third child in the midst of this. I actually thought I was going to quit. I called my brother to tell him I was dropping out and he talked me through.

I eventually completed this at the right time with the support of my husband, mum and classmates who have become lifetime time friends.

What did the experience teach you?

The lessons were a lot but most importantly, that having the right support structures are vital to an individual’s success. The fact that if you set your mind to something, you can actually conquer and also the fact that there is a time to understand your capacity and to pace.

The grace of kemGod suffices in every situation and makes accessible and available resources and the strength to carry on.

What are you looking forward to?

The need to improve the supply chain structures is critical to the success of the MSMEs ecosystem, which plays a significant role in the overall societal framework.

Since the supply chain is at the core of all areas including healthcare, manufacturing, construction, food & produce for consumption and infrastructural development in Nigeria, It is therefore a huge opportunity to close the issues of underperformance due to poor design, sub-optimal supply chain management competencies, insufficient infusion of global innovations and design, apathy to quality improvement, poor data, stock visibility and so on.

Therefore, what I am looking forward to are things I have wrapped into 3parts. First is that, in view of the issues around the supply chain and its vital impact on trade, I am looking forward to a more integrated and agile supply chain ecosystem for MSMEs in Africa. I am quite focussed on increasing the knowledge and awareness of the supply chain as it impacts every area of our lives and reducing the barriers currently faced by MSMEs as it relates to improving their efficiencies and maximising their profitability.

Secondly, I am deliberate and intentional about igniting the interest and passion of the next generation (future leaders) especially the females to have an interest in areas of the supply chain as an educational and career choice. This is now more important than ever as the supply chain will continue to remain relevant into the future. The more we can inspire the interest of the next generation in supply chain, the more we can guarantee the future economic stability of the African continent.

Finally, I am looking to use my experiences to enhance the ease of doing business in Africa in whatever way possible- Things don’t have to be as tough as we have it.

Advice to women

My advice to women is to take a leap, contribute, ask, do something other than staying wrapped in fear. The only thing you lose in making a move is moving closer to where you are going – you learn from the experience.

I say this from my experience. At a time in my life, I would sit in the board room and look around the table – the MD and the directors will sit around the table. I will be the only female manager outside of the leadership team with a bevy of male colleagues. When the Directors ask questions, my male colleagues answer confidently and I marvel at their grasp of the issues.

When we go out of the room, I get to hear “Azuka how far? What do we do about this? We need you to bring your expertise here” I learnt the hard way that my male colleagues do not have the answers but make bold and confident suggestions. This I must say is much better than staying clammed up and making no contribution.

That day, I made up my mind to contribute in meetings. When I look back at the meaningful contributions I made, and challenges surmounted, I see the room would have benefited from more women. As such, I have since been deliberate about ensuring the rooms I am in have more diversity.

The question to consider is: As fellow women, do the decisions we make in our daily lives reflect our belief that women should not be denied the right to live up to their potential because of their gender?