Right now, I’m sitting at an airport in Charlotte, USA, waiting to catch my (delayed) plane back to Sweden after a very exciting training module at the Husqvarna U.S. headquarters. My trainee colleagues and I have spent a week learning more about our operations in the U.S. and we got the opportunity to visit factories and customers, as well as participate in some product testing and leadership training.

Lisa Barrehag

So, how to entertain yourself at an airport? During my year as a trainee I have had plenty of practice in this area and I don’t think shopping is the best option, especially not for a purchaser who happened to spot that exact same perfume a couple of days ago for a much lower price than what the airport offers. Instead, I was considering reading a book or checking out another article about the latest innovations in the battery industry (can’t believe I never realized how fascinating batteries are until I started working in electric sourcing) but then I decided the best option would be to finalize this post before the boarding starts.

The last time I wrote a post here, I was right in the middle of the preparations for Husqvarna’s EXCITE Day 2015, an event for our 150 biggest suppliers. As I wrote then, I was really looking forward to the event and now when it’s over I can say that it not only lived up to, but also managed to exceed my expectations. Organizing and participating in the EXCITE Day is definitely one of the biggest highlights during my trainee time so far, even though I had very busy days and constantly felt like I had to be at five places at the same time. In the end, people seemed to really enjoy the event, and it felt very rewarding receiving all the positive feedback afterwards (and of course also some ideas on how to improve!).

For me personally, the EXCITE Day was a very stimulating event where I got to talk to lots of interesting and nice people (internal as well as suppliers), listen to great presentations from top management and watch the award winning suppliers receiving their awards. The day also included round table exercises in small groups, where suppliers from different commodities sat down together with Husqvarna Group representatives and discussed a few topics, such as innovation and sustainability. One of my responsibilities was to gather all the notes from these discussions and to summarize all the input. It was very interesting to go through our most important suppliers’ thoughts and points of view and I could quite quickly spot some recurring comments.

One of the most noticeable things that pretty much every group brought up, was the importance of having a close cooperation and utilizing the suppliers’ expertise in our development processes. After all, it is important to acknowledge that our suppliers are the experts in their respective field and that we can learn a lot from them. I think that this view is something that mirrors a general trend with supplier and customer forming a closer collaboration based on trust and a win/win mindset instead of a more “transactional relationship” with sole price focus. Research highlights many advantages with a collaborative relationship: improved quality, more innovative thinking and time to market, to name a few of them. To me, it seems quite clear that this is more beneficial over the long term than the more traditional perception of the supplier/customer as opponents where only one can end up being the winning party. I think that the award ceremonies during the EXCITE Day was an important way for us to apply this mindset. By highlighting the suppliers’ efforts and successes we could hopefully encourage continuous improvements and assure that great performance doesn’t pass by unnoticed.

Enhancing the relationship with our suppliers is something I will continue to work with during my next assignment, which will start very soon. I will move on to Asia and my third assignment which will be divided between Shanghai and Kawagoe (a “small town” some 30 minutes train ride outside Tokyo). I will be involved in supplier development activities and value engineering tasks, such as organizing workshops including product tear down together with the suppliers. And guess what, there’s another supplier day coming up in December, this time exclusively for our Asian suppliers. Looks like November is going to be busy…

So to sum up, it seems like I will have a very exciting autumn and although I certainly will miss all of my amazing colleagues in Sweden (and England and Germany!), I really look forward to start my next assignment.

Lisa Barrehag
Global Trainee
Sourcing