Shaun Plunkett
VP Global Supply Chain
Shaun is an experienced supply chain leader, with experience of over thirty years. In his four years (and counting) at Macmillan Education, a naturally charismatic and motivated leader, Shaun has a leadership style that is one of engagement and open conversation. In a pre-COVID world, Shaun spent most of his time traveling and meeting local offices across the globe in order to better understand their process and suggest best practices. He also made it a point to meet other stakeholders and end-customers so he could get the full picture of operations.
As an extension to his leadership strategy, Shaun prides himself on being a change agent, someone who is invested in improving processes by challenging the status quo, and raising the bar for service in whatever capacity he can. Shaun has been responsible for delivering a resilient and agile model based on regional supply/ printing hubs with strategic partners in each continent. The strategy has delivered multi-million euro savings across freight, packaging, inventory and production. Speaking further about his strategy for Macmillan Education, Shaun says that the need for reform was essential, adding “The operation I inherited was Far East focused, where a team of about 30 would report into me, source and brings books to our single warehouse in the UK, and then ship some of those productsout again back to Asia. So you can imagine there were some inefficiencies there.” Soon after he presented his findings to the executive team, Shaun was tasked with the job of creating a supply chain strategy that cut time, costs and dependencies on single regional sourcing model. Since the operating model was Asia-focused, lead times were significant and this created a non-traversable obstacle for improvement in Macmillan Education’s operations.
Shaun’s previous experiences include supply chain operations for Universal Music Group, Harper Collins, Sony Music and Allied Bakeries. Shaun also owned and managed an on-line wine business for about 15 years and is an advanced qualified sommelier.
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