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A full 70% of transformations fail.  And it’s not because of poor strategy.  When supply chain transformations stall, most organizations blame the wrong things.

They blame technology. They blame market volatility. They blame “change resistance” in vague, abstract terms. What they rarely do is look hard at the way boundaries are drawn, how incentives are designed, and who actually has to execute the change.

In our work at Boost, and through the experience of our subject matter experts like Dr. Bonnie Curtis – a global senior executive with four decades in manufacturing, supply chain, HR, and sales – we see a consistent pattern:

Supply chain transformation doesn’t fail because the strategy is wrong. It fails because the system for execution is misaligned.

Bonnie’s background includes integrating a multi-billion-dollar oral care supply chain into a global consumer products company, expanding operations into 43 countries, serving as CHRO of a major distribution company, and completing a PhD in Leadership and Change. Across those experiences, the same truths keep surfacing.

1. Margin Leakage Starts Where No One Owns the Boundary

Most organizations are structurally designed to leak margin.

Not because people are careless, but because the way functions are divided creates natural blind spots. Finance owns one set of metrics, supply chain owns another, commercial teams a third. Each group optimizes its own piece, while the total system quietly erodes.

Bonnie has seen this dynamic play out in high-SKU environments where commercial teams continuously launch new variants to grow shelf presence. Every new SKU looks like “growth” from a commercial perspective… but on the supply chain side, older SKUs are scrapped, inventories are written off, complexity explodes, and the cost sits on someone else’s budget line.

Individually, the launches appear successful. Collectively, they are net neutral on revenue and quietly destructive to margin.

At Boost, we see the same pattern in:

• Promotional programs that drive volume but leave unsold inventory piling up in warehouses
• Case-picking and customized configurations offered “for free” to strategic customers, then extended to everyone
• Local deals that look attractive on paper but don’t reflect the true cost to serve

The fix is not simply “more discipline.” The fix is metric visibility:

• As much as possible, align KPIs across boundaries so that what is good for one function is not quietly bad for another.
• Put finance in the boat from day one, validating savings and ensuring they show up in the bottom line, not just in slideware.
• Use real-time, activity-based costing to expose where complexity is destroying value.

Margin leakage is rarely a mystery. It’s just living in the seams of the organization.

2. You Cannot Optimize Cost, Speed, and Quality at the Same Time

Leaders love to say they want to optimize cost, speed, and quality. It sounds good in a town hall, but it is operationally impossible.

In Bonnie’s experience leading global oral care expansions into dozens of countries, strategic clarity was everything. Entering a mature, competitive market demanded differentiation and innovation. Entering a lower-income market required radical affordability and cost discipline. Trying to optimize everything at once would have meant optimizing nothing.

The same tradeoffs apply when architecting a modern supply network:

• If cost is the primary lever, you build monuments – large, highly efficient assets running standardized products at scale.
• If responsiveness is the lever, you design for flexibility – modular lines, shorter changeovers, and nodes closer to demand.
• If quality and innovation are the lever, you accept higher cost and potentially slower throughput in exchange for differentiation.

We often see companies struggle because they never explicitly choose. One region pushes for agility. Another pushes for standardization. Procurement optimizes unit cost, while sales wants hyper-tailored configurations to win deals. The operating model becomes a patchwork of compromises.

Boost’s view is straightforward:

1. Start with the business strategy: what truly differentiates your company in the market? How do you build a wide moat between you and your competitors?
2. Translate that into an operating strategy: are you a cost leader, a responsiveness leader, or an innovation/quality leader?
3. Then design the network and capabilities accordingly – not as a theoretical exercise, but tied directly to margin, service level, and risk tolerance.

The companies that get this right don’t have “perfect” networks. They have coherent ones.

3. Cost Savings vs. Cost Shifting: The Whack-a-Mole Problem

It is surprisingly easy to celebrate cost savings that don’t actually exist.

Bonnie tells the story of warehouses where, historically, every pallet in and out was charged a standard rate. It was simple and administratively clean – but wildly inaccurate. When digital tools finally enabled real activity-based costing, the team discovered that some SKUs cost four times more to handle than others.

Suddenly, old assumptions about “profitable” customers and “profitable” SKUs didn’t hold.

In another example, promotional products that didn’t sell created a clash between commercial teams and supply chain. Supply chain wanted to scrap the inventory quickly. Commercial teams resisted because the write-off would hit their budget. So the organization rented extra warehouses to store the obsolete stock, only to scrap it months later anyway – at higher total cost.

On a spreadsheet, each individual decision seemed rational. Systemically, it was expensive.

The whack-a-mole problem appears when:

• One function can reduce its costs by increasing complexity elsewhere.
• Savings are claimed based on negotiated terms, not realized P&L impact.
• Metrics are isolated and don’t capture total value stream performance.

A durable cost transformation is built on three principles:

1. Finance co-ownership: Finance is not just an after-the-fact reporter but a design partner in initiatives.
2. Total-system metrics: Decisions are tested against end-to-end economics, not just local KPIs.
3. Customer impact clarity: If savings are visible to the customer (e.g., downgraded service or quality), they will likely evaporate as the market reacts.

At Boost, we encourage clients to ask a simple, ruthless question about any cost initiative:
“Where will this cost show up instead?”

If the answer is “nowhere,” you may truly have savings. If the answer is “somebody else’s budget,” you have discovered cost shifting, not cost reduction.

4. Digital Tools Help – But Only If You Treat Change as Adaptive, Not Technical

Organizations often treat digital transformation as a technology installation project: choose a platform, implement it, train people, and declare victory.

Bonnie’s experience says otherwise.

She has lived through major ERP deployments and seen how they consume organizational bandwidth. The technology itself can work, but the implementation often diverts attention, overloads teams, and leaves them running parallel systems because the new one doesn’t yet provide what they need.

The real learning came later, working with newer AI and analytics tools:

When digital solutions are built with the people doing the work – and leadership stays close enough to adapt based on feedback – the benefits far outweigh the complexity.

The distinction here is between:

• Technical challenges: Hard but understood. We know how to do it. (e.g., building a new plant using known methods.)
• Adaptive challenges: New, uncertain, and dependent on behavior change. We have to learn while doing.

Supply chain reinvention, digitalization, and operating model redesign are primarily adaptive challenges. They require leaders to:

• Stay engaged beyond the kickoff.
• Create safe channels for teams to report what’s not working.
• Be ready to pivot and adjust designs mid-flight.
• Avoid the reflex to “restructure” when execution struggles, instead of learning and adapting.

In other words, technology isn’t the point. The point is to build a more sensing, responsive, and honest system – and that requires a different kind of leadership attention.

5. Culture Is Not “Soft Stuff” – It’s the Execution Engine

Bonnie has both run global supply organizations and served as CHRO for a billion-dollar distribution company. She is unequivocal: culture is not a nice-to-have; it is the primary determinant of whether change sticks.

Two cultural extremes are especially harmful:

1. “Nice” cultures where people avoid conflict and don’t want to hurt feelings. Problems stay hidden because no one is willing to confront misalignment or underperformance.
2. Fear cultures where mistakes are punished. People hide issues until they are too big to ignore, and escalation comes far too late.

In both situations, cost, margin, and transformation outcomes suffer.

Effective transformation cultures share common traits:

• Radical transparency: Leaders are honest even when the news is hard. When plants need to close or roles will be eliminated, they say so early and clearly.
• No punishment for learning: People are encouraged to surface problems while they are still small, rather than firefighting catastrophes.
• Visible commitment from the top: Executives don’t delegate transformation; they model it. They “burn the ships” – removing the option to go back to the old way once the new path is chosen.

In one major transformation, Bonnie had to keep plants running for more than a year after announcing closure. Retention could have collapsed. Instead, transparent communication and honest partnership with employees kept performance strong until the final day.

From Boost’s perspective, culture is the operating system for transformation:

• It determines whether frontline managers will champion change or resist it.
• It determines whether data is trusted and used or manipulated and ignored.
• It determines whether adaptive challenges are approached with resilience or with fear.

You can’t spreadsheet your way around a broken culture.

6. The Frontline Manager: The Most Overlooked Lever in Supply Chain Transformation

Eighty percent of employees report to frontline managers. That statistic alone explains why so many transformations fail.

Strategic decisions are made at the top. Program offices coordinate and track. External partners bring frameworks and tools. But the day-to-day reality of change is lived between frontline leaders and their teams.

Bonnie’s research and experience converge on a simple truth:

If frontline managers are not equipped, supported, and aligned, transformation will either stall or become cosmetic.

So what does “support” look like in practice?

• Frontline representation on change teams: Include frontline managers early in design, not just in rollout. They see operational realities others miss.
• Regular, informal listening: Structured town halls are useful, but unstructured breakfasts, walkarounds, and open Q&A often reveal the real story.
• Realistic workload management: When transformations are layered on top of already overloaded roles, burnout and fatigue follow. Sometimes the most powerful signal is leadership removing other demands or pausing noncritical work.
• Meet regularly (in the office, not on drive-bys) with the frontline manager to provide coaching, listen to their concerns, and step in to help when needed. Only 15% of frontline managers report having weekly meetings with their bosses during changes.

Boost frequently works with clients to design governance models that explicitly include frontline voices – not as a courtesy, but as a non-negotiable component of execution.

7. The Critical Decision Point: When Leaders Realize This Is Not Business as Usual

Large-scale transformation efforts face a predictable moment of truth.

It usually happens after the initial enthusiasm has faded, when early complexity and resistance surface, and when metrics aren’t yet moving in the desired direction. At this point, executives have a choice:

• Treat the difficulties as a sign that the strategy is flawed or people are “failing to execute,” and respond with restructuring or blame.
• Or recognize that they are in the messy middle of an adaptive change and lean in – listening harder, adjusting intelligently, and reinforcing the vision.

Bonnie sees this decision point as the true accelerator or failure trigger. Leaders who succeed in transformation:

• Accept that the first design is never perfect.
• Stay close to the work without micromanaging.
• Use real-time data and frontline insight to iterate.
• Keep explaining the “why” until they are tired of saying it – and then keep going.

In a world of shifting tariffs, geopolitical shocks, and rapid technological change, resilience is not a slogan; it is an operating requirement. Organizations that meet these moments with learning, not panic, emerge stronger.

At Boost, our role is to help executive teams recognize and navigate this decision point. We bring the tools, experience, and external perspective, but the critical choice – to treat transformation as adaptive, systemic work – belongs to leadership.

8. Where Boost Fits In

Across global manufacturers, distributors, and consumer brands, we consistently see the same challenges:

• Margin leakage hidden in organizational seams
• Networks designed without clear optimization choices
• Cost programs that shift rather than remove expense
• Digital transformations treated as IT projects instead of adaptive journeys
• Cultures that are either too nice to confront reality or too fearful to surface it
• Frontline managers left out of design but expected to deliver results

Our work at Boost, supported by experts like Bonnie Curtis, focuses on closing the gap between strategy and execution:

• Making gross-to-net performance visible and manageable
• Aligning incentives and KPIs across functions
• Designing supply networks that match your strategic reality
• Building cultures and leadership behaviors that support continuous adaptation
• Equipping frontline managers to be change-makers, not just recipients

Transformation is no longer an episodic event; it is a continuous condition. The organizations that thrive will be those that can both protect today’s margin and reinvent their supply chains for tomorrow’s uncertainty.

Boost exists to help you do both.