A New Chief Supply Chain Officer Needs a 90-Day Logistics Evidence Pack

A leadership transition creates pressure to act quickly. Yet a new chief supply chain officer inherits more than a network of plants, warehouses, carriers, and suppliers. The role also inherits reporting definitions, contract compromises, temporary workarounds, disputed data, and service promises that may not match physical capacity.

That makes the first 90 days an evidence problem before it becomes a transformation program. The objective is not to postpone decisions. It is to build a defensible logistics baseline that separates persistent structural constraints from temporary exceptions—and shows which intervention will produce a measurable result.

Supply Chain Dive reported that Manuel Cabañas will succeed Alex Alvarez as senior vice president and chief supply chain officer at Suntory Global Spirits. The transition offers a timely reminder: even an experienced internal or external leader needs a disciplined way to learn the network before changing it.

Start With Five Evidence Files

The first deliverable should be a compact evidence pack organized around five connected views.

1. Lane economics

Build a shipment-level view of transportation spend by origin, destination, mode, carrier, equipment, customer, and accessorial type. Include tender acceptance, spot-market use, minimum charges, detention, layovers, reclassification, and claims. Cost per shipment alone is misleading; cost per unit, mile, pallet, hundredweight, and revenue dollar reveals different sources of margin leakage.

The file should reconcile invoices to contracted rates and planned routing. A lane that appears expensive may be buying essential surge capacity. Another may look competitive until accessorials and empty repositioning are included.

2. Inventory positioning

Map inventory by SKU family, node, age, demand velocity, service region, and working-capital value. Then connect those positions to inbound lead-time variability and outbound order promises. The crucial question is not simply how much inventory the company owns, but whether it sits where demand can use it without premium freight or preventable transfers.

This is where transportation and inventory decisions must meet. A distribution center with strong fill rates may be borrowing performance from excessive safety stock, while a lean facility may generate costly expedites that another department absorbs.

3. Service failures

Create a common taxonomy for late pickup, missed delivery, short shipment, damage, temperature excursion, appointment failure, customs delay, and customer refusal. Record the promised milestone, actual milestone, responsible party, root cause, recovery action, and financial consequence.

Do not accept “carrier delay” as a sufficient cause. The actual failure may be a late order release, unrealistic transit standard, unavailable dock appointment, incomplete export document, or capacity tendered after the routing-guide cutoff.

4. Contract exposure

Summarize renewal dates, rate escalators, volume commitments, fuel mechanisms, liability limits, termination rights, service credits, data-access provisions, and change-of-control clauses across carriers, brokers, 3PLs, facilities, and technology providers. Highlight agreements that expire within 12 months and obligations that depend on volumes the current forecast no longer supports.

This prevents a new strategy from colliding with an inherited commitment. It also identifies near-term negotiating windows where evidence can turn operational pain into better commercial terms.

5. Facility constraints

Document dock doors, storage positions, labor availability, shift patterns, yard capacity, throughput by process, automation limits, maintenance downtime, cutoff times, and seasonal bottlenecks. Compare designed capacity with demonstrated sustainable capacity—not the best shift ever recorded.

Constraints should be quantified in operating units: pallets per hour, trailers per door, cases per labor hour, orders released before cutoff, and maximum queue time. That lets leaders test whether a proposed network change solves the bottleneck or merely moves it downstream.

Distinguish the Structural From the Temporary

Three tests help prevent reactive decisions.

First, examine duration. A problem recurring across several planning cycles, seasons, or contract periods is more likely structural than an isolated weather or labor event. Second, test concentration. If most failures originate on a small group of lanes, SKUs, customers, or facilities, targeted correction may outperform a network-wide redesign. Third, compare definitions. “On time” may mean requested date to sales, appointment compliance to transportation, and ship-complete date to the warehouse.

External signals also need context. An Inbound Logistics review of global supply chain trends cited data showing completed decarbonization actions reported in 2025 were down 53% from data shared in 2024. A leader seeing a similar internal slowdown should first establish whether projects were canceled, delayed, reclassified, or simply measured differently before declaring the strategy broken.

A Practical 30-60-90-Day Sequence

Days 1-30: Validate the baseline

Name an owner for each evidence file, define every metric, and reconcile totals to finance, order management, warehouse, and carrier records. Interview operators at the exception points: dispatchers, customer service teams, dock supervisors, planners, procurement managers, and invoice auditors. Their workarounds reveal gaps that executive dashboards often conceal.

Finish the first month with a signed data dictionary, a list of unresolved discrepancies, and a baseline scorecard. Avoid presenting false precision where the underlying data remains contested.

Days 31-60: Choose bounded interventions

Rank opportunities by customer impact, margin exposure, implementation effort, reversibility, and time to evidence. Select a few bounded tests: rebid a lane cluster, reposition a SKU family, revise a cutoff, repair a tender sequence, renegotiate an accessorial rule, or change appointment logic at one facility.

Each test needs a hypothesis, owner, control group or prior-period comparison, expected result, guardrail, and stop date. That structure keeps pilots from becoming permanent workarounds without proof.

Days 61-90: Measure and commit

Compare actual results with the baseline using the same definitions. Confirm that a cost reduction did not degrade service or shift expense into inventory, labor, claims, or customer penalties. Scale interventions that produce repeatable gains; stop those that do not; and assign longer structural questions to a funded roadmap.

The 90-day output should be a decision ledger: what changed, why it changed, what evidence supported it, what result followed, and what remains uncertain. It gives the executive team a common factual foundation rather than competing departmental narratives.

Make the TMS the Evidence Spine

A transportation management system can connect orders, tenders, milestones, rates, invoices, exceptions, and delivery outcomes at shipment level. That makes it the natural evidence spine for the new CSCO—provided definitions are governed and integrations are validated.

CXTMS helps freight forwarders and logistics teams consolidate execution data, expose exceptions, and measure performance without rebuilding the story in disconnected spreadsheets. Request a CXTMS demo to see how a unified transportation record can support a credible 90-day logistics baseline.