End-to-End Supply Chain Leadership & Transformation
About Adrian Hall
Practical supply-chain experience, developed over 30 years
HMS is led by Adrian Hall, an experienced supply-chain professional with more than 30 years' experience across manufacturing, planning, operations and transformation.
My career has been built around understanding how businesses actually operate and finding practical ways to improve them.
I've worked across the end-to-end supply chain, from demand and forecasting through planning, procurement and inventory to production, capacity and customer service.
That experience has taken me from operational supply-chain roles through to management, interim leadership and consultancy, working with businesses of different sizes and across a range of manufacturing sectors.
Where the experience came from
I started my supply-chain career in the chilled and frozen food sector, working for a vertically integrated food manufacturer.
This gave me an early grounding in the importance of effective operational and commercial controls, as well as practical experience of how the different parts of a supply chain interact.
I progressed into managing both Demand Planning and Production Planning, including leading the implementation of an S&OP process for a multi-site operation.
That combination of operational and commercial experience became an important foundation for the work that followed.
From supply chain management to consultancy
Since 2012, I've worked primarily through interim management and consultancy assignments, helping businesses develop and implement supply-chain systems, processes and better ways of working.
The work has included:
-
Demand & Supply Planning
-
S&OP
-
Inventory Management
-
Procurement
-
ERP & MRP
-
Production Planning
-
Capacity Planning
-
Warehousing
-
Forecasting
-
Operational improvement
-
Change and transformation
I've worked across sectors including drinks, health and skincare, chemicals, horticulture and engineering, supplying both domestic and international markets.
Experience across different types of business
My experience has included:
Family-owned and independently managed businesses
Where practical decision-making, limited resources and the need to make improvements without unnecessary complexity are often important considerations.
Larger manufacturing organisations
Where scale brings different challenges around processes, systems, data, structure and coordination.
Private-equity-backed businesses
Where operational performance, visibility and the ability to deliver change can be particularly important.
Working across different environments has reinforced something I have come to believe strongly:
There isn't one standard solution to a supply-chain problem.
The right approach depends on the business, its people, its products, its customers and where it is trying to go.
Technology is part of the solution — not the solution itself
I've gained significant experience working with ERP platforms, MRP and specialist demand and supply-planning systems.
I've also developed Excel-based planning solutions and management dashboards where a practical solution was needed.
But technology has never been the starting point for me.
A system can support a good process.
It can also make a poor process happen faster.
The process needs to make sense before the system can support it effectively.
That principle is one of the reasons I take an end-to-end view of supply-chain problems.
How I approach improvement
Over the years, I've learned that the problem you can see isn't necessarily where the problem started.
A customer is waiting for an order.
Production is struggling to meet the schedule.
Purchasing is expediting materials.
Inventory is higher than it should be.
The forecast appears to be inaccurate.
Each of these can look like a separate problem.
Often, they aren't.
Every decision in the supply chain creates a consequence — often somewhere else.
My role is to understand those connections, identify the underlying causes and work with the business to make practical improvements.
Why HMS?
HMS was established to make that experience available to manufacturing businesses that need practical support to improve, develop or transform their supply chains.
I'm not interested in creating unnecessary complexity or producing recommendations that look good in a report but are difficult to implement.
The objective is straightforward:
Understand the problem.
Find the cause.
Make the improvement.
Build the capability.
Looking for experienced supply-chain support?
Whether you're considering a transformation, facing an operational challenge or need experienced interim leadership, an initial conversation is often the best place to start.
Let's have a conversation.
[Get in Touch]