A New Supply Chain Chief Starts Today: Build a 90-Day Service Baseline Before Modernization

Matthew Hook starts as Molson Coors' chief supply chain officer for the Americas today with a clear mandate: continue modernizing operations and improve service. The first move should not be another transformation project. It should be freezing a trustworthy day-zero operating baseline.

That distinction matters because a new executive inherits both the network and its measurement problems. If metric definitions, data sources, or exception rules change alongside physical operations, the business may report improvement without knowing whether service actually improved. A 90-day baseline creates the control group that modernization needs.

A leadership change creates a measurement deadline

Supply Chain Dive reports that Hook assumed the Americas role on October 12 after joining the company in 1999 as a production management trainee. His most recent work included brewery modernization and strengthening the operational foundation for customer service.

The scale behind that assignment makes measurement discipline essential. Beverage networks must synchronize ingredients, cans and bottles, production campaigns, finished-goods inventory, distributor appointments, and seasonal demand. Even one facility decision can affect hundreds of downstream relationships. When Molson Coors announced a plant closure in 2020, for example, Supply Chain Dive reported that the facility had produced 4.8 million barrels and shipped to 261 independent distributors in 2019.

Packaging changes add another layer. The company previously committed $85 million to begin moving Coors Light six-packs from plastic rings to cardboard wraps and to upgrade machinery so its North American portfolio could use the format. In another capacity example, it completed a line capable of producing about 750 million sleek cans annually. These figures are not current service measures, but they illustrate why a brewery modernization program can alter production cadence, SKU mix, handling, and transport demand at the same time.

Freeze five views of day-zero performance

A useful baseline is not one enterprise OTIF percentage. It is a linked record showing what customers experienced, what inventory was available, and what transportation actions were required to deliver that result.

1. Plant-to-DC lead time

Measure elapsed time from finished-goods release to confirmed receipt at the distribution center. Preserve the median and the 90th percentile by plant, destination, lane, product family, and carrier. The tail matters: an average can improve while the worst lanes continue producing shortages.

Use fixed event definitions. “Ready” might mean quality-released and transport-eligible, not merely packaged. “Received” should be tied to a consistent gate, unload, or system-confirmation event. Otherwise, teams can shorten reported lead time by moving timestamps rather than freight.

2. OTIF by customer and cause

Record on-time, in-full performance against the original customer promise and retain any revised promise separately. Segment results by customer, distribution point, SKU family, and order type. Then attach a standardized cause to every miss: production, inventory, carrier, appointment, customer request, weather, or master-data error.

This prevents an inherited backlog from being mistaken for a failure of the new operating model. It also stops broad averages from hiding a service problem concentrated among a few distributors.

3. Inventory age and availability

Capture days on hand, aging buckets, stockouts, and inventory held for quality or allocation reasons. In beverages, a network can appear healthy at the total-case level while the wrong package, brand, or location creates service failures. Baseline both aggregate inventory and usable inventory at the orderable SKU-location level.

4. Premium freight

Track expedited moves, spot-market purchases, team drivers, recovery transfers, and other unplanned transport costs. Link each charge to the order or shipment it protected and to a reason code. A service gain that depends on rising premium freight is not yet a stable process improvement.

5. Exception duration

Count not only exceptions but also the time from detection to ownership, decision, and resolution. Two operations can have the same number of late shipments while delivering very different customer outcomes because one intervenes earlier.

Separate inherited conditions from new results

The 90-day window needs cohorts. At minimum, label every service exception by when its underlying commitment was created:

• Inherited: order, production plan, tender, or inventory constraint existed before day zero.
• Transition: commitment was created during the diagnostic and stabilization period.
• New operating model: commitment followed a documented policy or workflow change.

Do not erase inherited failures once resolved. Close them with their original date, financial impact, customer impact, root cause, and corrective action. That record gives the new leader a fair starting point while preserving accountability.

The same rule applies to wins. If OTIF rises because teams cleared an inherited backlog with emergency capacity, record the improvement and its cost. If it rises because appointment lead times and tender rules changed, preserve the workflow version and effective date. The question is not simply “Did the KPI improve?” It is “Which controlled change caused it, and can the result repeat?”

Turn 90 days into three operating phases

Days 1-30: define and capture. Lock metric definitions, source systems, time zones, exclusion rules, and baseline segments. Reconcile shipment, order, inventory, appointment, and freight-payment records. Resist resetting targets until the data is comparable.

Days 31-60: diagnose and stabilize. Rank service loss by customer impact, recurrence, and avoidable cost. Apply limited interventions to the highest-value failure modes, but tag every intervention so its effect can be distinguished from normal variation.

Days 61-90: prove and prioritize. Compare cohorts, validate that gains persist without disproportionate expediting, and approve modernization work only where the baseline shows a measurable constraint. Each initiative should have an owner, target, expected service effect, cost boundary, and review date.

Make the scorecard auditable in CXTMS

CXTMS can preserve the shipment history behind this baseline: original and revised promises, tender events, carrier acceptance, appointments, pickup and delivery milestones, exception reasons, and accessorial or premium-freight costs. That turns an executive transition from a sequence of slide decks into a traceable operating record.

Leaders can compare plants, lanes, customers, carriers, and time cohorts without losing the event-level evidence. When a modernization project goes live, its effective date can be matched to subsequent service and cost outcomes. The result is a scorecard that shows not just movement, but causality.

Modernization deserves urgency. Measurement deserves to come first. Request a CXTMS demo to build a shipment-level service baseline and make every improvement auditable from day zero.