Lucy

My role at M&S is to shape the future logistics network strategy and create a pipeline of opportunities for change. For me, the most interesting part of my role is shaping the business cases that sit behind our programmes – helping to answer the question, “Should we invest in this, or not?” 

It’s a collaborative effort to secure investment across the division, making sure we position our requests in the right way to the senior team. The team element is important to me, and it’s been really rewarding to help define how our logistics network operates.

M&S really has an appetite for change: there is a real belief in where we’re heading, and the business is putting the infrastructure behind it. We’re always looking at where the industry is now, and identifying opportunities to evolve and improve the efficiency of our logistics network while ensuring we stay on track to meet our net-zero target by 2040. 

It’s an exciting time to join M&S with the transformation journey we are on – there will be a lot of change and investment over the next 5 years, designed to make us more efficient and effective at what we do. The team mentality and appetite for change across logistics will make this possible.

In the past year and a half, I’ve been building relationships across both the logistics teams and the wider business to grow my understanding of why we do what we do. I’ve always found that understanding what people’s roles entail and what challenges they have means you can have a lot more meaningful conversations when you’re delivering a change programme. That’s why I like going to visit our UK distribution sites for myself. 

Every year, we also go and lend a hand in-store and in our distribution centres. This really helps us to see what’s going on day to day and how we can make changes to improve.

My role will also shortly be expanding to include the delivery of the Strategy for 12 months, which means I will be working with a team of Project Managers to deliver the change programme.