A recent survey of COOs and senior supply chain leaders across the EMEA region underscores a clear directive: improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase organisational agility—all while navigating the complexities of advancing technology, risk, and sustainability.
Surveys like the 2023 EMEA COO Survey are essential for staying ahead, providing benchmarks on industry standards that help COOs excel. Navigating this role demands actionable insights to drive adaptability and resilience. While the full report explores these themes more in depth, I’ve highlighted the most relevant takeaways below to support your focus on operational excellence.
Driving operational efficiency is the top priority
COOs are prioritising operational efficiency, with 22% from the survey highlighting it as their top strategic focus.This emphasis reflects the growing pressure to counter rising costs in raw materials, energy, and capital, all of which significantly impact profit margins. As global competition intensifies and revenue growth slows, COOs are tasked with finding efficiencies to keep costs down and margins stable. Closely following these priorities are goals such as expanding capacity (14 %), advancing sustainability initiatives (12 %) and investing in innovation (10 %).
Key challenges: Ambition vs. reality
The key challenges for COOs in EMEA highlight a complex balancing act between ambitious objectives and real-world constraints. Technology-driven optimisation, while promising, faces setbacks from fragmented systems, data silos, and data quality issues — each a barrier to full digital transformation and achieving a strong return on investment.
Effective risk management remains challenging as rapid changes and disruptions outpace many organisations' ability to anticipate them. COOs also continue to struggle with attracting and developing the talent required to drive these transformations. While talent strategies often emphasise workforce expansion and standardisation, issues like limited knowledge transfer and resistance to third-party involvement reduce their effectiveness.
These findings underscore that today’s COOs need strong strategies in digital capabilities, data management, risk planning, and talent development to navigate complex operational demands and sustain a competitive edge.
ESG and the untapped potentials
Embedding sustainable practices, despite widespread commitment, is hindered by gaps in expertise and resources. And despite having dedicated sustainability teams, many COOs still view environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives as a medium priority in decision-making. This hesitation is largely due to limited internal capabilities and a persistent perception that ESG may not yield immediate business benefits.
Consequently, many COOs place carbon footprint considerations secondary to more pressing operational objectives. The potential for ESG to enhance long-term performance remains underappreciated, highlighting an opportunity to better understand and leverage sustainable practices as drivers of competitive advantage and value creation.
I’d recommend reading How Gen AI is Transforming Sustainable Supply Chains. It highlights the ways in which digital transformation can directly support sustainable practices. Strengthening digital capabilities not only enhances operational agility but also enables organisations to integrate meaningful ESG efforts that contribute to both performance and environmental goals. This approach can be foundational as COOs increasingly consider how to align technology and sustainability for lasting impact.
In Conclusion: COOs crucial role in today's modern business landscape
Today’s COO plays a crucial role; not just in meeting operational targets but in turning them into competitive advantages. By refining efficiencies, adopting digital capabilities, enhancing risk management, and aligning with sustainable practices, COOs are charting a forward-thinking path for their organisations.
Their challenge and opportunity is to navigate these priorities in a way that fosters resilience, agility and lasting impact in an ever-evolving business landscape.
Forfatter spotlight
Tore Christian Jensen
As a part of the Strategy & Operations practice Tore has worked with analysis, development and implementation of operational strategies. Tore has deep experience with aligning business models to changing market demands through optimisation of business processes and aligning systems, organisation and governance accordingly. He has industry experience from manufacturing, transportation, consumer products and energy. His main focus is on on the operational core processes but he also covers administrative support processes. As a program manager Tore has been leading transformation projects for international clients heading multiple parallel projects and reporting directly to executive committee members. His responsibilities cover everything from initiating assessments, identifying opportunities for improvement to building business cases and following up by designing solutions and driving teams through implementation.