Phil Livingston

Tell us a bit about yourself and your role 

My name is Phil Livingston, I’m 57 years old and I’m an English citizen – albeit now with a Swiss passport as well. 

I live in the Greater Geneva area, closer to Lausanne, in Switzerland, and I'm married to Coryn, who's also English. We have a 19-year-old daughter, Siena, who is in the UK attending university. 

Our parent company is based in Japan, and our tobacco business is headquartered in Geneva.  We take a lot of pride in upholding the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen – or continuous improvement. 

As SVP of JTI’s Global Supply Chain, my responsibilities run essentially through the entire supply chain, including our leaf operations. We purchase about half of our leaf from contracted growers – that’s 68,000 small farmers around the world – while the other half we buy from established  suppliers. 

I'm also responsible for procurement operations for our non-tobacco materials – mainly paper-based products. That runs through into our manufacturing operations as well. We have 36 factories around the world and a footprint in more than 130 markets. 

Most recently, we’ve taken responsibility for the warehouses in our local markets, which used to be run locally. So, we now look after the full, end-to-end supply chain, including all the logistics and planning operations.

How did you end up working in supply chain?

I originally graduated as a chemical engineer from Newcastle University and, from the beginning, I’ve worked in the consumer goods area.

My career started with P&G, where I worked for 20 years – originally in R&D, but mostly in the engineering space and then increasingly in manufacturing. 

I then moved into the consumer area in pharmaceuticals with Novartis, which was when I moved to Switzerland, before spending five years with Coty, a major beauty player and the largest fragrance manufacturer in the world. At those companies my responsibilities included  engineering, safety, quality, packaging development, innovation – basically all of the technical functions within the supply chain. 

I was lucky enough to join JTI in 2020 in a manufacturing role and, within just a few months, I was asked to take responsibility for the supply chain and I’ve been running it ever since. My core expertise remains in the manufacturing area, but I have enough knowledge in terms of how we expand and operate across the end-to-end supply chain. 

What does a typical day look like for you?

I try to spend about a quarter of my time on the road visiting operations, whether that’s the leaf operations, the factories or increasingly the market warehouses. I also spend time with suppliers and with our market teams trying to cover the full supply chain. 

We have a fairly strong drumbeat in the organisation in the form of a daily direction-setting meeting, when we get visibility on challenges in the supply chain. We complement that with a monthly review of our KPIs and overall performance so we can make adjustments on a strategic basis, a monthly S&OP meeting, and then we have quarterly and annual reviews to take a deep dive on our long-term roadmap. 

I try to leave around two hours a day free to reflect, carry out email tasks and  keep the supply chain machine flowing by answering questions, doing the necessary approvals and moving things forward. 

When I’m not on the road I try to be in the office at least three days a week and, in the overall spirit of work-life balance, aim to spend a couple of days a week at home – of course still attending Teams meetings, but also catching up and taking some time for reflection.

Can you give an overview of JTI’s supply chain from leaf to consumer?

There are nine leaf ‘origins’ around the world, the largest of which are in the Americas and Africa, but also in Europe and Asia where we have very close relationships with growers. 

We purchase leaf throughout the year because of the seasonal differences between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, which means we’re constantly planning and adjusting. If you speak to our leaf and blend colleagues in R&D, it’s very similar to being a sommelier in terms of understanding the blends to make sure we’re delivering a consistently high-quality product – not just in each market, but around the world. As a consumer-centric company, this is really crucial for us.  

We face a lot of challenges: political challenges because we work in some very complicated  areas, particularly in Africa; challenges brought on by the impact of climate change and adverse weather in general. We have a very dispersed footprint, which means we can compensate around the world when it comes to maintaining consistency and quality. 

Having previously been in consumer goods, the leaf operation was an absolute revelation in terms of its complexity and how it operates. One of the things I’m most proud of is the work we do in each of the communities at the heart of these operations. We’re working in some of the most challenging and, let’s be honest, some of the poorest parts of the world, but the way we invest in the farmers to improve their leaf quality and improve their yield – therefore improving their income and their livelihoods – is very special. What’s also important to us at JTI is the investments we make in communities, whether it’s boreholes for water, medical facilities or schooling. Giving back to these communities is key. 

In terms of factories, our major operations are in Eastern Europe, but we have facilities in Africa, the Americas and Asia as well. I’ve only been here for four years, but JTI and my predecessors have driven a high level of standardisation, which is a great platform to work from. Now, we’re driving a very strong operational excellence programme to enhance efficiencies, identify and eliminate losses and really take our capabilities to the next level. 

Tell us about the various contributing factors when building an integrated supply chain

One of the great strengths of JTI has been its commitment to investing in ERP – in our case SAP, so we have a very strong backbone in our supply chain. When I joined, we were successfully implementing the rollout of SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) for Supply Chain and that is a really strong foundation for our end-to-end  integration, which we are now taking to the next level. At the front end of the supply chain, we've established a central material planning organisation for our non-tobacco materials and we’ve also invested in direct connectivity with suppliers, which is taking our relationship with strategic suppliers to the next level when it comes to sharing information and data. 

As we move through the supply chain, we’ve been strengthening our S&OP processes and we’re in the process of  moving to a 3PL/4PL logistics model – working with a 4PL provider to provide a control centre to manage our sea freight, air freight and a large percentage of our  land freight. It’s about bringing in expertise from the outside, and working together with our teams, so we can drive better efficiencies and quality of service to our customers. 

We’re also working on a strategy to harmonise warehouse management systems to give us better visibility on inventory and better management of KPIs. Finally, we’re strengthening our work in demand planning, working with our partner Accenture to develop machine learning capabilities to improve our forecast accuracies. 

One of the strengths of JTI has been our ability to manage change throughout the process. This has allowed us to work very closely with the markets, explain the reason for change and then provide the necessary training to all levels of the organisation to use the sales forecasting tool. As every supply chain professional knows, you can never achieve a 100% accurate forecast, but every time you improve that forecast, it gives you a better opportunity to manage your inventories and production schedules. We’re starting to see those benefits flow all the way through the organisation and back to our suppliers.

What are your professional and personal goals for the next couple of years?

In the global supply chain organisation, we’ve set out our vision through our MGSM: mission, goals, strategies and measures. This is a simple document, backed up with a lot of detail behind it, which really sets out the roadmap in an easy-to-understand format. Our current MGSM runs from 2021 to 2025 and so, as we get into next year, we’ll be defining our next five-year roadmap taking us to 2030.

One of the things I really like about JTI and what keeps me coming to work is the ability to keep learning. And so, from a professional point of view, I’m really going to be focused on learning more about this digital space and where we can take AI, Gen AI, machine learning, digital twins – learning for myself but then helping to set out those foundations. 

On a personal basis, it’s a case of making sure I maintain the right work-life balance. Everybody's different in that respect, but we have a super quality of life here in Switzerland. It’s a great place to be, a great place to raise kids, and I want to continue enjoying that. And also, particularly with my family, I’d like to continue travelling, exploring the world and seeing new cultures.

To read the full story in the magazine click HERE

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