Jimmy Dixon, a principal with Oliver Wight Americas, has over 30 years of experience in the pharmaceutical, energy, and industrial sectors. He will be a panelist on the Supply Chain Moves Front and Center panel during SFNet’s Asset-Based Capital Conference in Las Vegas next week. His diverse background includes strategy development, execution, and measurement; business planning and analysis; supply chain management; as well as other corporate development activities. Jimmy’s experience includes diverse business situations such as mergers and acquisitions, turnarounds, and accelerated growth both in private and publicly traded companies.

Prior to joining Oliver Wight, Jimmy held various leadership positions such as Chief Operating Officer, Vice President – Global Supply Chain, and Director, Strategy and Integrated Business Planning. His breadth of experience, from executive suite to the factory floor and throughout the supply chain, makes him uniquely qualified to lead organizations through their business process transformation initiatives. His management expertise spans the full range of operational functions – Planning, Manufacturing, Sourcing, and Logistics Delivery.

As a principal with Oliver Wight, Jimmy has assisted companies in a broad range of industries in transforming their business planning and execution processes – consumer packaged goods, retail food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, nuclear energy, diamond mining, and retail. Among his client companies are Halliburton, Unilever, The Hershey Company, Del Monte, GE, and Tiffany & Co.

Jimmy is passionate about leading companies in developing a winning growth game plan, achieving alignment and integration of planning, execution, and measurement to achieve business excellence. He brings extensive experience in developing and deploying strategy and transformation programs, including associated change management, as well as ongoing continuous improvement. He uniquely combines business management expertise with operational planning experience to bring integrated solutions to business process improvement opportunities.

Jimmy earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Technology from East Carolina University.

Please give us an overview of the services offered by Oliver Wight and your role.

Oliver Wight is a premier planning education and consulting firm, best known as pioneers of S&OP/IBP. I’m a consultant, educator, and coach assisting companies with implementing Integrated Business Planning and Strategy Management to improve growth and profitability.

What are the top 3-4 ways you help companies optimize their supply chains, both short and long term? 

1. Integrating strategy with plans. Aligning the business strategy with demand, supply, assets, and inventory to achieve business goals and objectives.
2. Size the business.  Extending the planning horizon into the future to size the business in order to grow profitably.
3. Management Operating Model.  Provide companies with an aggregate integrated planning model to understand choices and implications to optimize the business.

How has this changed in the past several years and how has Covid affected these?

An immediate focus has been placed on foundation and fundamentals of planning and scheduling in the short term due to labor shortages and inventory stock outs. As the supply chains start to rebuild their capabilities, we are starting to see companies focus on longer term strategy and making investment choices to be ready for the post pandemic economy.

Which industries are seeing the most challenges right now and why?

• Manufacturing, Construction, Retail & Wholesale Trade are having significant disruptions. Low levels of inventory, price increases are being accepted w/o volume elasticity driving down demand.
• The toilet-paper shortage in the early days of the pandemic offers another useful case study. Stay-at-home orders led to a sudden 40-percent increase in demand for retail toilet paper.
• Facing a shortage of lumber, homebuilders briefly sent prices to $1,711 per thousand board-feet last month, an amount that implies a typical 2,000-square-foot house would require more than $27,000 in framing lumber alone, relative to a lumber bill of about $7,000 before the pandemic.
• Driven by largely labor related shortage associated with the pandemic.Many of our clients are saying they’re having 50 to 60% labor shortfall gaps and can’t build enough inventory to keep up with demand.

Could you give readers an overview of 2022 from your standpoint? Do you see the challenges of the past two years easing up?

Business leaders are resilient and accustomed to change.  Around 75% of CEOs are largely optimistic about 2022.  That said, clear risks lie ahead, including the gradual reduction of stimulus from central banks, stubborn inflation, a slowing China and the emergence of COVID variants.

CEOs are understandably concerned about potential threats to short-term performance that could result from disruptions, including macroeconomic volatility, cyber and health risks. We aren’t going to be fully back to pre-pandemic conditions in 2022, but I believe it will continually get better as we learn to navigate the pandemic new normal.