Diego Fonseca Strikes The Right Chord
Diego Fonseca is leading the end-to-end inbound supply chain for Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, which comprises sales and operations planning, replenishment, inventory management, and supplier relationships, as well as logistics and the supply chain center of excellence.
Diego Fonseca is vice president, supply chain and logistics, with Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits (Southern Glazer’s), a preeminent distributor of beverage alcohol.
RESPONSIBILITIES: Leading the end-to-end inbound supply chain, which comprises sales and operations planning, replenishment, inventory management, and supplier relationships, as well as logistics and the supply chain center of excellence.
EXPERIENCE: Head of digital supply chain transformation; head of supply chain execution, logistics planning lead, and senior manager, sales and operations planning; all with Kraft Heinz Company; management consulting roles with Booz Allen Hamilton; software developer, Convergência Latina Participações e Consultoria.
EDUCATION: MBA, operations management, MIT; computer engineering degree, Instituto Militar de Engenharia in Brazil.
Growing up, my dream was to be a professional musician. I play guitar and nothing makes me happier than being on stage playing the music I love for other people. If musicians were more likely to make money and have a stable living, I’d have probably followed that path.
Coming from a lower middle-class household taught me the value of hard work early on. I valued every opportunity as a step toward creating a better future for my family. I joined the military’s school system when I was 10 years old and left 12 years later with a computer engineering degree.
After college, I joined a management consulting firm where I worked mainly on supply chain optimization projects. I’m good at working with data and mathematics and like having a balance between working with people and looking at a screen all day. In supply chain, I could get all this.
Southern Glazer’s’ 10-year supply chain transformation strategy and its remarkable history of growth and industry leadership inspired me to join the company in 2024. I’m excited to power its transformation through people, process, and technology.
Supply Chain a Driving Force
Before the pandemic, supply chain was pretty much a support function. Now, it has become a driving force for a company’s strategy. The culture of supply chain must shift from transactional to problem-solving.
At Kraft Heinz, we were able to implement this kind of mindset change on a large scale. Our waste levels on ingredients and manufactured food and beverage had been growing steadily for years. We launched a cross-functional program to reduce it by 30% in the first year. That’s where I would say my career really changed.
We had been measuring waste at the time products were leaving the warehouse to be destroyed. We shifted to forecasting when products risked moving past their shelf life, moving from a reactive to a proactive approach.
We worked with our sales teams to move these items before they became a waste risk, and with manufacturing to prevent production when inventory was not needed.
After two years, we had cut waste by two-thirds. This was not driven by technology, but by changing the culture and mindset, and partly by the processes we put in place to hold people accountable. We’d post data on waste at the leadership level so people from commercial and supply chain teams were all incented to act.
At Southern Glazer’s, we have been able to implement the same approach, starting with out-of-stock risks. We created processes to predict stock-out risks resulting from volatility in supply or logistics and solve them before they happen.
We assigned our best talent to lead this program. Your top talent should always go to the toughest challenge. That’s when you see the best results. It’s also great exposure and growth for them.
My passion for solving supply chain problems keeps me in this field. I’m always learning and working to provide the best service for our suppliers, customers, and commercial teams.
If you want to be challenged, you want to be in supply chain.
Diego Fonseca Answers The Big Questions
1. What rules do you live by?
I live by The Golden Rule, which I learned from my family. How can I see myself in someone else’s shoes, and make decisions that are not only intended to solve my problem but address the collective wellbeing of our organization and people around me?
2. If you could attend any event in the world—whether past, present, or future—what would you choose?
The LIVE Aid concert in 1985. Freddie Mercury was the best singer in history and that concert was one of his last. He was already sick and still did a phenomenal job. It was iconic.
3. If you could accelerate the development of a supply chain disrupting technology, what would you choose?
Large language models (LLM, a subset of AI) could be critical for supply chains because we make so many decisions, and our systems rely on multiple databases. Yet in supply chain, everything’s connected. AI could help us connect and learn from past events to make better decisions.