Safety - and sure delivery to world

Joe Coote. Photo / Supplied

Joe Coote comes from the lucky country.

At the age of three Fonterra's supply chain boss was sucked into a fuel pump at his dad's fuel distribution business before being thrown out a bit bruised with some clothes ripped off - 37 years later safety is top of his list.

"I think in Australia and New Zealand there's still a lot of work to do to be really great at managing safety culture," Coote said.

"It's industry, it's country, it comes down to a number of factors. Certainly when I worked in the Northern Hemisphere there was more focus on safety."

Fonterra had made important improvements in safety in the past two to three years but there was still more to be done, he said.

Fonterra has more than 15,000 employees worldwide and in its 2009 annual report noted the death of two of its people, one in New Zealand in early 2009 and the other in Australia at the start of the next financial year, although the total recordable injury frequency rate dropped 38 per cent in the 2008-09 year to 23.7 per million work hours.

Fonterra recently won Best Health and Safety Initiative at the 2010 New Zealand Workplace Health and Safety Awards.

While safety is Coote's priority he is driven by the need to keep promises to customers and at the lowest cost to the co-operative's farmer shareholders.

Coote has been in charge of the supply chain at the world's biggest dairy exporter for a year and oversees an operation that exports 2.2 million tonnes of product to 140 countries each year, using 140,000 20-foot equivalent units (TEU).

"The rural aspect was interesting, the dairy industry was interesting and then just the challenge in the supply chain in this part of the world, there wouldn't be many supply chains that have all of the challenges that we have to manage at Fonterra."

Fonterra has to compete for customers who can get short lead times from local suppliers.

"How do we as a business then make it so the customer doesn't need to know that we're on the other side of the world?" he said.

"We forecast with the customer and then we do a lot of work in our business to manufacture today what the customer wants in two or three months' time ...

"We schedule when we have to get it on to a truck, when we have to get it on to a vessel and then if everything goes to plan then it arrives when the customer wants it in two months' time."

The global shipping industry was looking more positive but in the last 12 months had lost more than $28 billion, Coote said.

"What that's meant is that the shipping industry have really shrunk their capacities, so we've seen that into New Zealand," he said.

"It makes it tough."

New Zealand had 12 container ports which was quite high for a population of four million, he said.

"So I think over time we would see potentially more of the significant volume moving through fewer ports and a lot of that is driven by larger vessels coming to New Zealand."

Coote originally trained as an accountant but has spent more than 15 years working internationally in supply chain management.

"I did start off as a numbers guy I guess, but I really got attracted to the physical side of the operation and actually running the business," he said.

"I like to play the game, not just keep count of the score."

Joe Coote:

* Job: Fonterra general manager group supply chain.

* Age: 40.

* Family: Married with a son.

* Born: Beaudesert, Australia.

* Home: Auckland.

* 1990-93: PricewaterhouseCoopers chartered accountant, Australia.

* 1994-96: GlaxoSmithKline, UK, supply chain manager.

* 1997-98: Colgate-Palmolive Company, US, supply chain manager.

* 1999-03: PricewaterhouseCoopers, UK and Australia, supply chain consultant.

* 2003-09: Coles Myer, general manager supply chain.