Not long ago, having led our Products practice in Iberia for a number of years, I moved from Barcelona to Chicago, where I currently lead supply chain for all industries in the Midwest. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be taking up this role.
In Europe and the United States, it’s clear that the intelligent supply chain is now a source of real competitive advantage for companies across the consumer goods, pharma, retail, industrial and manufacturing sectors. And I’ve had some amazing opportunities working with our clients (most recently in the beauty, fashion and food manufacturing industries) to help them realize some impressive benefits from bringing increasing intelligence to their supply chain.
Connecting the world
The scale of opportunity, and the value we can bring to companies in the Midwest, was really brought home to me when I hosted a quarterly Town Hall for our global business. Bringing together our whole Supply Chain & Operations team, the event was a great way to see old faces, get to know new ones, and hear more about the incredible work we’re doing around the world.
The Town Hall demonstrated the true strength in depth of the network we’ve established, with colleagues providing multiple examples of how we’re helping world-leading organizations to create intelligent supply chains that drive growth through new customer experiences, as well as greater profitability, resilience, and responsibility.
Creating new trust
Responsibility, in particular, is becoming increasingly important as we emerge from the pandemic into an incredibly fast-changing and, in some respects, very different world.
And diversity and inclusivity are a big part of responsibility – enabling people to work differently and better through the transformative power of data and digital technologies.
These are issues I’m passionate about. As the Inclusion & Diversity lead for Strategy & Consulting in Accenture Midwest, I’m doing everything I can to support women in leadership. It’s a hugely empowering role and great to be fulfilling it in such a diverse organization.
The future is equal
At Accenture, we believe the future workforce is an equal one. That’s why we’re committed to a gender-balanced workforce by 2025. Already today, more than 215,000 women work at Accenture. Forty-two percent of our board of directors, and 27% of our global management committee, are women. And 49% of our new recruits and 44% of our promotions are women, too.
What about our North America business? We’re achieving great results here too. We increased the number of women from 35.8% to 40%, achieving our 2020 goal. Multicultural women make up 19.6% of our workforce, up from 15.6%. And overall, since we began reporting our data for North America in 2016, we’ve added more than 25,000 people of diverse backgrounds.
It’s an extraordinarily exciting time to be working here at Accenture and I can’t wait to see where we take this business next. In future posts, I’ll give you more updates on our Midwest supply chain business and the milestones we’re hitting in our journey to get to equal.
By Susana Castella
About the author: Susana Castella is Inclusion & Diversity Lead for Strategy & Consulting at Accenture Midwest.
This article originally appeared on www.accenture.com and is republished with permission.
