As Marketing Director for Philips Lifestyle Incubator in Cambridge, he was introduced to IfM and strategic roadmapping, strategic make-or-buy and innovation management. He has applied these best practices throughout his career and re-engaged with the IfM in 2020 as Director Global Digital Strategy and Operations Transformation at Smith+Nephew. In this role he has applied and co-developed IfM frameworks, tools and processes to develop Smith+Nephew’s end-to-end digital supply chain strategy.

Kam’s personal experience as a client makes him a valuable advocate of IfM’s unique knowledge-exchange consulting approach “we do it with you, not to you”. Working in cross-functional business-critical teams he has used IfM frameworks to identify and systematically deconstruct problems to inspire new breakthroughs and deliver workable innovative solutions. He has seen first-hand how these frameworks help teams accelerate progress, spot missing capability or technology and develop commercially savvy concepts that create value.

EXPERTISE

Kam works at the intersection of customer experience and backend operations: understanding customer journeys, generating insights and developing value propositions, then linking them to the operating model by evolving or integrating capabilities (people, process, data, technology) to deliver differentiated end-to-end experiences.

Building on this end-to-end view, Kam advises manufacturers and their partners across four connected areas, co-leading IfM training in the first three:

• Global value networks: using IfM’s industrial ecosystem and network configuration mapping to identify new partners, make-or-buy options, decoupling points and scope for standardisation or modularisation, then aligning network configuration, capabilities, plant roles and manufacturing footprint with strategy to improve cost, responsiveness and resilience.
• Concurrent engineering: converging product, production and supply-chain design rather than settling them in sequence. Surfacing the dependencies between domains, such as a product choice that constrains production and the supply base, allows trade-offs to be resolved early through shared, set-based design rules, cutting late-stage changes and lead times.
• Digital supply chains: using IfM’s digital scenarios framework to move beyond the Industry 4.0 technology list to what digital can actually do. Assessing benefits, risks and technology and skills maturity helps organisations focus investment where it delivers most impact, and decide what not to transform.
• Circularity: designing circular supply chains across multi-partner ecosystems, from end-of-life recovery to reintegration. Mapping material, financial and information flows reveals where resources accumulate, value is lost and data is missing, so economics, governance and traceability can be aligned, recovering value, reducing reliance on virgin materials and enabling verified circular claims.

Drawing on hands-on transformation experience, Kam is comfortable with ambiguity. He has unlocked value across FMCG, Retail, Online, Mobile, Entertainment, Consumer Electronics, Financial Services and Healthcare by understanding end-user problems and designing, de-risking and delivering new products, services, processes, capabilities and technologies.

He communicates a vision, engages stakeholders with a fresh perspective, and sets up cross-functional, cross-regional governance to align business and IT and drive value.

HIGHLIGHTS

Before being invited to join the IfM, Kam gained global commercial and operations experience holding senior management and functional roles in strategic planning (commercial and operations), proposition, marketing, brand and product development for mainly technology, media and telecom companies such as Smith+Nephew, Carphone Warehouse, Telefonica, Philips, Disney, 3, Orange, Dixons and Coca-Cola. During his tenure at Disney and Philips he led and co-led two corporate start-ups.

Kam is affiliated with the following activities at the IfM:

Centre for International Manufacturing

Digital Supply Chains Consortium