Growth Of One Network Inspires Shift In Leadership

Posted by: KHTS Articles in News Articles October 18, 2021 - 9:52 am 0 797 Views

How Innovation is Driving CEOs Back to the Frontline

Companies experiencing success rarely make changes to their core leadership group. Interestingly, the practice of CEOs stepping down at the apex of rapid growth and profit is becoming more common, and leaders are doing it for reasons that are more strategic and beneficial to the company. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison are all examples of CEOs who have stepped out of the C-suite and back onto the frontlines of their respective companies. And the results were nothing short of legendary.

A more recent example that perfectly captures this new corporate strategy is One Network, a global provider of supply chain control towers for autonomous supply chain management. One Network was founded by supply chain and technology visionary Greg Brady. Brady served as the company’s CEO from 2002 to 2021 when he announced that he would step down and name former board member Mark Brady as the company’s new CEO. The move enabled Greg’s active role in sales and strategic customer implementations and allows him to realize the promise of true digitization of the entire supply chain and unlock for major brands an enormity of financial savings growth and margin opportunity.

That digitization of the supply chain starts with the control towers. A supply chain control tower system makes the outside supply chain environment visible to the enterprise and provides that visibility to immediate trading partners only. The advanced, intelligent control tower is a hub for visibility, decision-making and action. Those actions are based on real-time analytics, monitoring and managing and the towers control decisions and execution across functions and across companies to optimize the entire network. Control towers are the artificial intelligence (AI) of the supply chain and for One Network, that AI – Brady’s vision– is called NEO. One Network’s control towers capture a moment in AI innovation everyone wants to have but few know quite how it works.

As emerging technologies continue to change business processes, supply chain leaders work under the promise of how control towers make the supply chain better, faster and more intelligent, but without a uniform market description of what a control tower is or how to utilize it properly and effectively. Brady and One Network fill that void, demonstrating how a control tower uses data to create insights and enables its users to make smarter decisions. It is the entry point for all people with a supply chain mandate, making it the starting point for all decision-making. This continues to be important as we adjust to the changes that came with a global pandemic. important during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Brady, who has been called “the smartest guy in the supply chain,” grew his company through the visionary leadership of understanding control tower innovation and found industry success by delivering predictive and prescriptive analytics with real-time information to help customers lead their industry. In fact, under Greg’s leadership, One Network grew to engage more than 1.7 billion commercial transactions per year. The company hosts more than 132,000 active users and spans 54 countries across six continents.

The effect of COVID-19 on the global market made clear to C-suite executives the need to digitize their supply chains, which has created an increased surge in demand for digital network services. As the company’s network visionary, Brady has relinquished the CEO’s role to take on a more active part in sales and strategic customer implementations. This new focus returns Brady to the frontlines of innovation, where One Network established itself by showing customers how to deploy digital networks to grow bottom line and margins. His goal is to ensure global projects achieve significant gains – at least $100M in the net margin – and bring dramatic process simplification through proper digitization of the entire supply chain.

And the timing couldn’t be better for Brady. One Network has been awarded some of the most significant government contracts, including a $62M contract from the United States Air Force (USAF) Awards, $43M from the United States Navy, and a six-year contract from the United States Marine Corps – all of which include managing tens of billions of dollars in inventory.

In addition to government contracts worth billions, Brady and One Network utilize its innovative network tower technology to serve humanitarian causes. The American Red Cross, Ministries of Health in Ghana, Rwanda, Nigeria and other global humanitarian organizations are tapping One Network to strengthen supply platforms for AIDS, malaria and other healthcare products. Furthermore, One Network is involved in securing healthcare logistics management for Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.

Today’s CEOs face new and emerging challenges stemming from the global pandemic’s lessons and an ever-changing landscape of business processes. There are no shortages of things that demand time and attention to maintain competitiveness and provide value to its customers and its governing body. Decisions are tough, and delegation is critical. The choice of CEOs like Greg Brady to return to the frontlines of a company to manage and usher in new innovative technologies is an example of the how CEOs now broaden their value. By rising through the ranks, nearly every CEO maintains a level of passion and expertise for a particular function or product offering core to its business. Stepping down from the top spot and focusing exclusively on a specific business sub-set that fosters further growth and market positioning can sometimes be one of the best moves a founder can make.