Lucy Pitcher talks Supply Chain: Women, Visibility, and Communication

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go to everstream.ai to book your demo today. Hello everybody and welcome to a new episode of Supply Chain Pioneers. And with me today I have Lucy Pitcher, who is founder of the Supply Chain Women Network.

She's also the founder of the Women Impact Network, a director for B2B comms and a charity ambassador. Hi. Hi, great to be here, Al. Thank you so much.

And Lucy, thank you so much for doing this. You're quite busy, have a lot to do, obviously, given all your roles. So why don't you quickly introduce yourself and then we get into the thick of it. okay sure you did a great job so i'll summarize again i am lucy pitcher i'm a former journalist and b2b pr agency director and comms lead but today i help businesses in supply chain grow commercially through pr visibility and reputation and as you said now i'm also the founder of supplychainwomen.

com and that's a platform i've built to make women easier to see here and higher across supply chain. Perfect. And we're going to dive into that quite a bit more. So all your life, as you just said, you have been a journalist, you have been corporate communication.

How did you come up with the idea of founding Supply Chain Women? So I think it's really because I could see a gap from both sides. So as a journalist and someone who's organized events I know how hard it can be to find new and diverse voices you're nodding there I can only agree yes that's pretty it's not like nobody wants to do it it's just you don't really find a signal of people and their willingness so easily when it comes to a more diverse cast it's a lot of males are better in portraying themselves and putting themselves out there yeah completely agree so I think from the journalist side I know there's a gap there and from podcasters and event organizers and then since working in supply chain I know how many talented women there are whose experience and expertise deserves a bigger platform so my original idea was to create a pure directory to link those people who need voices with the women who deserve to be heard but then since then it's developed into a place where women can really tell their stories share their advice and i'm now working on adding a full events calendar and all sorts of resources that will support everyone in supply chain perfect so let me ask you is it now the perfect time to just start highlighting women or is it that it just would have been a good time a lot of moons ago and just nobody did it I think both of those things are true to a point.

But I think the world of work is going to go through the most monumental change in the next year to two years, all because of AI. So I think the focus is really important now to be on people. We all know that people buy from people anyway, and that isn't going to change. So my general advice to any business and to any person is to start being more visible now.

And to do it now, rather than thinking, oh, yeah, I keep meaning to do that, I'll keep putting that off. Because no one can build a reputation overnight. It's impossible. So everybody needs to take action.

And for women, we are still underrepresented in supply chain. So we do need more support. But actually, I'm an optimist. And as I say, there are brilliant women already in supply chain working at all levels.

So actually, I see it as a case of we need to recognize them, celebrate them. And by doing that, we'll get more women and young people and even people who might want to change careers to think about supply chain as an option for them. Yeah, and there's not enough talent in supply chain, if we're being honest, right? So there's a big talent gap and AI is not going to solve all of it.

So it's super important that we get a more diverse environment stood up. So as part of Supply Chain Women, you highlight how senior leaders got into their career, but also how people are just starting, just sharing their story, which is something, coincidentally, this podcast is doing as well So what is the typical answers to see how people got into supply chain management and what are maybe some of the funnier outlier stories Yeah I know that you always ask these questions. I'm aware that you've got some fantastic stories and I thought you might ask me.

So I have had a look already at the women who submitted their profiles and actually I was quite surprised that it's 29% say that it was by accident or they fell into it which is actually lower than might have expected because a lot of people I feel like tell me it was an accident but at the moment it's 29% by accident the rest we've got a real mix so some through graduate recruitment schemes quite a few started started out in engineering actually a few came through family businesses.

One found a job through her husband and is now managing a 600 million pound supply chain. So that was a good link. And there's one woman, Ursula Heng. Now, I thought you'd like her.

She's an associate partner at IBM. And she blames Lego. Ursula says it was a combination of creating Lego sets and her dad really supporting her interest in science and technology and her general curiosity and that led her to where she is today at the top of IBM okay now that's good good for Lego that's actually also a good success story for them they should make a podcast with her actually okay that's great actually that's a funny story so you hear a lot of feedback now through these surveys that you do and sharing these stories so when you think about it what are some of the things you hear that the industry of supply chain management can still improve to make it feel more like an even playing ground for everybody involved?

Yeah, so when every woman submits her profile for the platform, I ask that question as research, so we don't publish those answers. That's, I can get a really good understanding and we can share that, those ideas, so we can make changes. So the top answer by some distance is visibility and role models. So that's quite validating for the platform.

I think women need to be seen and not talked about just as statistics. After that, it's sponsorship, not mentorship. I know you've talked about that previously. Mentoring is useful, but it's sponsorship that changes careers.

And that's when senior people just actively putting women's names forwards for opportunities and advocating for them and then when I looked at the answers the third is just all around culture I'm about flexible working caring responsibilities return to work support and also mentioned more times than I'd like is zero tolerance of harassment that clearly isn't something that every woman sees still and And I think it's important that we do understand that is still where we are today and that we need to do more on that.

Yeah. That's sad. Yeah. Let's hope that is getting better very quickly.

I think it developed quite a bit just in, if you look at movies from the eighties or nineties, it still has a different feeling than today. So I think culturally there's a little bit of a shift, but unfortunately not enough. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. I think, I think, I think everyone would say it's improved, but I still think there's work to be done. Improved is not enough. It just, there should be zero tolerance, right?

Obviously. Yeah. Okay. Understood.

Yeah. A little bit sad about this, but yeah. Working from home kind of gets rid of that topic a little bit, at least. Right.

Yeah. And I think that's an important point though, that just because we don't all see it, it is still happening and it is something that we all need to call out and address. Definitely. It's good that we talked about this here and highlighted it.

Okay. So let's go back to you maybe, because we now talked about women in supply chain management in general. So you also came from journalism into supply chain management so what was your perception maybe before really getting deeply into it to to then where you are now yeah so I've worked in male-dominated environments all of my career and I hadn't fully appreciated the scale and the influence of the women already leading across supply chain. Then I met Melanie Salter, who runs Boom, which is the global network of women in supply chain.

And Mel herself is an incredible woman who had a phenomenal career in supply chain. And she actually runs Boom because she knows what it's like to be the only woman in the room And that why she creates that space And through her network Mel has introduced me to more than a thousand of her members in 70 countries worldwide and from companies such a mix of companies so you know estee lauder adidas heineken right through to hp cargill um unilever so some a real mix of companies and when you go into that community and you hear the conversations those women have and just the experience and the expertise and the work that they're doing it just made me realize that the problem isn't a lack of brilliant women it's a lack of visibility of those women clearly and sometimes it also helps getting focused because you can't waste your whole day just sitting around waiting for stuff to happen right but you have to go home and maybe care for kids care for parents whatever and then things have to get done in time which in a supply chain world where warehouses close eventually anyway that's sometimes even more efficient to be honest yeah cool so we talked about creating awareness creating visibility very important supply chain women and ceo to fix that so you just launched supply chain women on June 4th, I believe, correct?

Yep, that's fine. Perfect. So we're now 11 days in. What does the success look if you look in five to 10 years in the future?

What do you want to achieve with this? Okay, good question. So you're right. We launched just over a week ago at Deliver Europe.

Since then, the site itself has already had 2.1 thousand visitors. and I think what's really exciting is that's given us 6.7 thousand page views so people are coming on and they are looking at different women and finding out more so that's what we really want for people to come and see the talent that's there and we've got 150 people signed up for profiles so it's a pretty fantastic start I couldn't really have asked for more for the future I think bizarrely the least interesting thing for me about supply chain women is the word women I'm leading on that because that's currently the biggest visibility gap that we have but long term the bigger ambition is to make the platform somewhere where people-led stories and people-led thinking can be found we've got a weekly newsletter called The Link I'd love that to be sent to a mix of men and women equally 50-50 again that's the people-led aspect that'll be a real win for me And then as a former journalist, the biggest success I could have is when any journalists, event organizers, business leaders, recruiters or podcasters like yourself, when you think I need a new voice, you'll come to Supply Chain Women to find that talent.

Yeah, I will definitely check it out and we hope others will as well. okay so you hinted to that then maybe already a little bit but if you think about ways to get involved in the project right as maybe being a company being a contributor like a podcaster journalist whatever or just as a female trying to to get their her voice heard how can they best contribute to subludgeoning women? Okay, I appreciate that question anyway, so I appreciate your support. I'm about removing all the barriers for women to be, for women to be seen, so it will always be completely free for women to add their profiles and share their stories.

It's also free for allies to add their profiles and for me an ally is any person, man or woman, who it would be useful for women in supply chain to know. Women are welcome to come and add their profiles. Allies are welcome to come and add profiles. Also share the platform.

So www.supplychainwomen.com. If you're a company, you can support us commercially.

And that just means we can keep building it and making more talent more visible. And then if anyone would like to contribute stories or resources or anything that is going to benefit others in supply chain, then I'd love to hear. It can be things that already exist or it might be that somebody wants an outlet to write something about their experience or what they've done and I'm really easy to find on LinkedIn just loosely picture so I'm really open to all ideas and anything that will benefit companies and I think there's so much that can be shared that isn't commercially sensitive that another company could find really useful I'm doing my best okay I'm promising something I'm not sure I can keep but I will try to put your LinkedIn bio and supplychainwoman.

com into the description of the YouTube page. So if you're looking at this right now, you can actually scroll down and find it, hopefully. So. Perfect.

If not, I'm going to do that after I watched it once again. Hopefully I remember. Good Perfect So next to Supply Chain Women which is what we talked about primarily today you also work on a project called Amplify Can you maybe share a little bit what Amplify is all about yeah sure amplify is a commercial visibility program so it's for companies who want to make their best people better known so then they can build trust open more doors and strengthen the reputation of the business so typically marketing teams are really focused on corporate branding corporate messaging but as i say in the age of ai people aren't going to trust broad company messages.

It's arguable whether they do or have recently anyway, but that is going to be less of an important channel, I believe. As I say, people buy from people, but it still amazes me so few companies are proactively giving their leaders or technical experts the training and the accountability that they need to become consistently visible. And it's that consistently visible piece that I really believe will make a difference for businesses. So my program does include LinkedIn training, but it's also content support, confidence building, and support with other speaking opportunities.

So panels, events, keynotes, and of course, podcasts like this one. Yeah, that's good actually, right? Maybe I could use that because consistency is not my thing, to be quite frank. I just post when I like it, which happens whenever inspiration comes in.

Well, and that's a credit to you because you're already building a really strong audience. So imagine if you were consistent. Yeah, exactly. Imagine.

But then also, who wants to be famous anyway? Ah, there's no fame comes into it. It's all commercial growth. We're not looking for fame.

We're looking for fortune. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, I'm always down for fortune. That's for sure.

Now you have founded Supply Chain Women, and that's already quite an undertaking. But then I also heard in our pre-discussion a little bit about your recent undertaking with technology. So how would you compare standing up the whole infrastructure behind supply chain women with the website and the all automation with working in a casual day of supply chain management? Oh, anyone who works in supply chain, I take my health to them.

Communications and PR and visibility is easy compared with what you guys do. Yeah, I have pushed myself. So I've built the whole supply chain women platform myself. I'm not a technical person.

We've all got to move the times. AI is making things so much more possible with so many more opportunities. And I'm really excited about what that brings. So I think that has definitely challenged me and taken me out of my comfort zone.

But, oh yeah, I don't hold a torch to the stuff that the women leading supply chains are my absolute heroes. Yeah, everybody working in supply chain has to go out of their comfort zone because, yeah, things will go wrong, right? That's the one thing that is for certain. Yeah, I should say I do crisis comms as well.

So I often help with the aftermath of when things go wrong, but yeah, I'm not responsible for fixing them. No, but that's good. more people would need that actually crisis communication supply chain management because yeah there's always a better spin to whatever happened today or yesterday or whatever delays the shipment now great lucy first of all thank you so much for doing supply chain women and putting yourself out there supporting everybody i think that's a great initiative thank you that's very kind i don't think he's even sunk in what kind of we're already achieving i'd say the reaction and the warmth and the number of women who have just said yeah i'm in and shared the most incredible stories i would encourage everybody to go and look at the 50 women who've already on there running some incredible supply chains some of them are in legal some of them in procurement some of them operations there's such a mix already and we're only just over a week in so yeah it's blown my mind hopefully we get a few more but for now we're actually at the end of this fine podcast so thank you so much for doing this thank you for having me of course and thank you for everybody who's watching till the very end and still sees that and for those of you who enjoyed this thank you so much and have a good morning afternoon or night wherever you are.

And with that, I'm going to say bye-bye.