J.M. Smucker’s Supply Chain Leadership Change Needs a 90-Day Operating Baseline

When a new supply chain executive arrives, the pressure to make a visible change can be immediate. The smarter first move is less dramatic: establish a trusted operating baseline before resetting targets, reorganizing teams, or launching another transformation program.

That principle is especially relevant at The J.M. Smucker Co. The company appointed Douglas Guilherme as senior vice president of operations and supply chain, effective July 29. According to Supply Chain Dive, the role combines responsibilities previously held across two senior positions and covers a broad operating system. Guilherme brings more than 30 years of experience and most recently led manufacturing, engineering, continuous improvement, planning, logistics, digital transformation, and network strategy at Hershey.

That breadth makes a common executive-transition problem more important: the incoming leader needs one version of operational truth without erasing the context behind current performance.

Why the baseline comes before the turnaround

A leadership handoff creates a measurement trap. Every function already has metrics, but definitions, time horizons, and escalation rules may differ. Manufacturing may measure schedule attainment by plant and shift. Planning may emphasize forecast accuracy at a monthly product-family level. Logistics may report on-time delivery using a carrier milestone that customer service does not recognize.

Changing targets before reconciling those definitions can create movement without improvement. Teams optimize the score rather than the customer outcome, while leaders mistake reporting variance for operating variance.

The external environment makes that risk worse. A separate Supply Chain Dive assessment of 2026 logistics conditions identified volatile trade policy, tightening capacity, cargo theft, geopolitical conflict, and fuel pressure as simultaneous challenges. It also noted that the typical June-to-October peak season was proceeding without a slowdown and that customers were replenishing seasonal inventories for the fourth quarter. A new leader therefore needs to distinguish inherited network weaknesses from short-term market noise.

The five-part operating baseline

The baseline should connect five operating domains rather than produce five independent scorecards.

1. Manufacturing

Start with schedule attainment, overall equipment effectiveness, unplanned downtime, first-pass yield, changeover time, and waste. Review these by site, line, product family, and shift. The objective is not merely to identify the lowest-performing plant. It is to determine whether lost output originates in equipment reliability, labor availability, material shortages, quality holds, or planning instability.

2. Planning

Measure forecast accuracy and bias at the level where decisions are made. Add frozen-window schedule changes, production-plan adherence, supplier commit reliability, and the percentage of demand handled through manual overrides. Persistent positive bias can inflate inventory; negative bias can produce expedites and missed orders. Aggregate accuracy alone can conceal both.

3. Logistics

Track tender acceptance, pickup and delivery performance, dwell, accessorial spend, mode changes, premium freight, and cost per shipment or unit. Use consistent timestamps and agreed exception codes. If “on time” means appointment arrival to one group and proof-of-delivery completion to another, the organization does not yet have a usable baseline.

4. Inventory

Pair days of supply and turns with aged inventory, stockouts, inventory accuracy, write-offs, and working capital. Segment by product velocity and service requirement. A high inventory level can coexist with poor availability when stock is in the wrong node, package format, or demand region.

5. Customer service

Anchor the entire view in case fill, order fill, on-time-in-full performance, backorder age, deductions, and perfect-order rate. Customer metrics should reconcile to the same orders, facilities, and timestamps used in planning and logistics. Otherwise, local gains can still produce a worse customer experience.

Separate structural problems from transition-period variance

The most useful baseline contains explanations, not just trends. Each major miss should be tagged as structural, recurring, or event-driven.

Structural issues include constrained network capacity, chronic equipment reliability gaps, unsuitable sourcing patterns, or systems that cannot exchange dependable milestones. Recurring issues include predictable seasonal demand, regular carrier shortfalls, and known changeover losses. Event-driven variance includes a temporary plant outage, a fuel spike, weather, or an isolated supplier failure.

This classification matters because each category demands a different response. Structural gaps may justify capital, network, or technology decisions. Recurring gaps call for planning-policy changes. Event-driven misses require containment and recovery without permanently distorting targets.

Leaders should also preserve at least 12 months of history where available. A rolling four-week view is useful for control, but it cannot reveal seasonality or show whether an apparent improvement merely reflects a favorable demand mix.

A disciplined 30/60/90-day cadence

Days 1–30: validate the facts. Document metric definitions, owners, source systems, refresh timing, and known data limitations. Reconcile a sample of customer orders from forecast through production, inventory allocation, shipment, delivery, and invoice. Select a compact set of enterprise measures and freeze definitions for the review period.

Days 31–60: find the operating constraints. Compare facilities, lanes, suppliers, and product families using common definitions. Build cause trees for the largest service, cost, and inventory gaps. Test whether failures cluster around particular nodes or handoffs. Assign accountable owners, but do not confuse ownership with blame.

Days 61–90: commit to focused interventions. Choose a small portfolio of improvements with explicit baselines, targets, benefits, dependencies, and review dates. Separate quick controls—such as tighter exception escalation—from structural projects such as network redesign or systems integration. Publish a weekly operating review and a monthly executive view using the same underlying data.

Where CXTMS supports the transition

A transportation management system cannot decide strategy for an incoming executive, but it can make the logistics portion of the baseline auditable. CXTMS centralizes shipment milestones, carrier performance, costs, exceptions, and documents so teams can compare lanes and service outcomes using consistent records. That creates a cleaner link between operational decisions and customer results.

The best 90-day outcome is not a brand-new dashboard. It is an agreed operating language, a short list of verified constraints, and a credible sequence for improving them.

Request a CXTMS demo to see how a unified transportation record can strengthen your supply chain operating baseline.