FORGING CONNECTIONS
HUGO FUENTES HELPS ORGANIZATIONS SEE THEIR SUPPLY CHAINS CLEARLY Environments can help to shape people, and Hugo Fuentes’s childhood home did just that. The veteran supply chain and procurement professional and current CEO of The Owl Solutions, a supply chain consultancy, grew up in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso. The city, a major seaport about 120km northwest of Santiago, remains one of the South Pacific’s most important seaports. The city’s port has served as a major stopover for ships travelling between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. “I’m from there,” says Fuentes, who is now based in Waterloo, Ontario. “That’s the reason my passion for supply chain and logistics started, because I spent most of my days in that place for my first 25 years. And today it’s still a very large port but pretty much focused on exports, like wine. Chile is very well known for wine.” It was against this cosmopolitan, logisticsdriven backdrop that Fuentes began his career in 2000. His first job was in the maritime industry, working for a large container shipping line called CSAV. He had just graduated in 1999 from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Val10 APRIL 2021
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paraíso with a degree in industrial engineering when CSAV hired him as a trainee engineer. The company ran a program in which it hired five or six engineers into a year-long training program. The engineers would rotate every two or three months to different functions, including operations, sales, marketing and so on. Fuentes’s first rotation was in procurement, specifically the bunkering division, which is responsible for the supply of fuel to ships. Along with providing an immediate education in procurement, the tasks associated with the position proved exhilarating. “I felt like I was working on Wall Street,” he says. “We were doing a lot of things like forward buying, evaluating trends, assessing risks and taking options – very exciting at that time.” A year later, the company moved Fuentes to a cost control management position in which he acted largely as a bridge between the operations and finance teams. The position involved costing operations worldwide. Similar to the bunkering division, the post proved exciting
to the 20-something Fuentes, as the company assigned him to manage cost control for the west coast of South America and the Caribbean. “I had to travel a lot,” he says. “But it was very nice because I had to visit pretty much all the Caribbean ports, all the South American ports on the West coast. It was very exciting travelling and getting to know different cultures.” Fuentes worked in that position for a couple of years before deciding to quit. The position was exciting, and those he knew questioned his departure, but Fuentes had long dreamed of studying for a master’s degree and possibly continuing his education abroad. Fuentes was eventually accepted into the Master of Science, Maritime Economics and Logistics program at the Rotterdam School of Management. He began the course in 2002, moving to the Netherlands with his new wife for what felt like an extended honeymoon. The young family returned to Chile the following year, where Fuentes was rehired at CSAV as global transportation manager. After a few years, the company offered him the position of director of operations and logistics at its branch in Mexico. The family, which now included the first of four children, moved to Mexico City in 2006. He worked for CSAV there for about twoand-a-half years. “It was very exciting because I had to negotiate a lot of contracts with ports in the country and all the rail companies and tracking companies,” he says. While Fuentes was still based in Mexico City, a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company named Tresmontes Lucchetti in Chile with operations across Latin America, offered him a position as supply chain director. The company wanted someone to help the existing team to design and implement a new distribution network. After about five years working in Mexico City, Feuntes and his family returned to Chile, where the company offered him a global supply chain role, based at their headquarters there. The opportunity involved implementing a sales and operations planning process (S&OP). After about four years at Tresmontes Lucchetti, a Canadian company named Finning offered Fuentes a position as supply chain director. The company is the largest Caterpillar dealer worldwide, with headquarters in Vancouver. While based in Canada, the organization has sizeable operations in South America due to the large number of mining sites on the continent. Those operations were situated in Santiago, and from there managed operations in four South American countries. The position seemed like an interesting move for Fuentes, given his experience in transportation and CPG. SUPPLY PROFESSIONAL
2021-04-05 3:21 PM
MIKE FORD PHOTOGRAPHY
BY MICHAEL POWER
