Manos Kapterian discusses the supply chain optimisation of Pearson International and sustainability, as well as how the circular economy has been a driving factor for their organisation. Manos describes how Pearson have focussed on process, technology, innovation and new ways of working to create new go-to-market models. 

Today's session will be looking at how Pearson are optimizing their publishing supply chain. 

Manos Kapterian is Senior Vice President Operations at Pearson. During a career spanning nearly 20 years in the education sector, he has held a number of senior operational and commercial roles, including as Managing Director at Pearson Qualifications International. Prior to joining Pearson, Manos worked in human resource roles in the travel industry and the not for profit sectors, as well as in retail management. Manos holds an MBA, is a fellow at the CMI, and is an avid sports fan. He lives with his wife and son in London.

Like most teams, and most organizations, cost pressures placed, Pearson’s have had cost pressures, and they place some degree of challenge. So, trying to drive and unlock financial benefits, has always been important, but they have also had operational pressures, and through several cycles of improvement to try and create more efficient and more effective ways of working and interacting with their customers. Manos describes a few of the things that Pearson’s have done. Of course, increasingly recently, environmental pressures and innovation in a way that can have a far greener supply chain has become important. Sustainability and the drive toward a healthy economy has been a key factor and within an operations function, taking the leadership role in all these areas has been super important to Pearson’s.

“Over the years, as I've said, a lot of our focus has been on each of those kinds of areas individually, and also collectively in terms of improvements. We've tried to develop more sophisticated forecasting capabilities, which we've deployed globally. That has allowed us to optimize the manufacturing methods that we have. We've invested in creating improved workflows in our warehouses so that we can drive efficiency, and really thought about our freight routes. To be fair, we've seen a significant amount of benefit that we've been able to derive from all of those initiatives, but some of the historic challenges with the print to stock model has persisted. We continue to see excess stock. We continue to see wastage. Our obsolescence is always higher than we'd like it to be. We have returns and those sorts of issues. I guess that's very similar with all of our competitors, so to try and mitigate that, we look to create some on-demand capabilities. We've been working with a range of printers to try and do that.

However, trying to manage a process, a complex process of moving files, securing them, maintaining them up to date, distributing them, that's been really complex and costly. Concurrently with that, digital print costs over the past years have traditionally been higher than lithographic printing. The quality has always, has actually never been quite as good, at least not in the eyes of our editorial team. Although both of those things have changed significantly in the last few years.

These were problems that we needed to try and solve because they persisted in our supply chain. Just over three years ago, we entered into an early discussion, and then into a partnership, with HP, in one of our key print partners in the UK, Ashford, where we developed an end-to-end solution. That solution brought together the set of existing capabilities that we had in digital printing, in on-demand, and integrated it to our older management processes, and finally connected them to the last mile” Manos Kapterian (Senior Vice President of International Operations at Pearson)