In 2023, Involvation and Rituals launched the brand’s first bespoke talent development initiatives to advance its supply chain. This was the latest phase in a long-standing, productive collaboration: Rituals first started working with Involvation in 2016, on supply chain and business technology projects.
Here, Elise Broekhuisen, Head of Supply Chain & Sourcing Development at Rituals, and Jeroen Scheepers, Partner at Involvation, share the origins of Rituals’ Supply Chain Academy, its evolution, and its impact so far.
Why a Supply Chain Academy ?
Rituals already had a Global People Academy in place to develop employees’ soft skills.In addition to this, the supply chain management team was looking for more extensive functional supply chain learning, tailored to the company's inner workings.
Rituals knew that, besides supply chain consulting, Involvation offered this type of learning and development via The Value Chain Academy. After seven years of collaborating on supply chain projects, Involvation also knew Rituals’ way of working. Involvation was the right partner to turn to, given their ability and willingness to tailor supply chain learning to Rituals’ needs. And to be agile, adapting to — and helping elevate — Rituals’ supply chain learning aims, and strengthening the organization’s supply chain.
Strengthening Supply Chain Learning at Rituals
Rituals and Involvation co-designed Rituals’ first supply chain learning program, called the Rituals Supply Chain Academy, over six months. The model responded to Rituals’ current company scenarios, as well as future aims:
- Rapid company growth: Rituals is a fast-growing brand, with annual growth of over 30%. Its global supply chain is managed from Amsterdam, by a team that’s expanded from 25+ to 90+ in seven years.
“Enabling this growth presents the supply chain department with significant challenges,” says Elise Broekhuisen, Head of Supply Chain & Sourcing Development at Rituals. “And we’re proud of our creative, challenging role in building and developing the brand’s supply chain.”
- Avoiding silos: In this fast-growing supply chain department, avoiding siloed working relationships was essential. Employees within the department needed to understand each other’s work and end-to-end processes, and how they interrelate.
- Employees motivated to learn and innovate: Feedback from Rituals’ regular employee surveys showed that people wanted to learn more about advanced supply chain principles. "Rituals expects its hires (who are often fairly young) to take ownership and feel empowered to make decisions, and skills development is an essential ingredient in this,” Elise adds.
- Ensuring end-to-end supply chain knowledge: Seeking both existing skills and potential means Rituals hires across all backgrounds, from supply chain-specific to general business. To boost cohesion and collaboration, they wanted to equalize the supply chain department’s fundamental knowledge of end-to-end value chain management and the role of Supply Chain in it.
- Expanding internal career horizons: Understanding the supply chain’s full scope is key for horizontal — as well as vertical — career moves within Rituals. For example, from the supply chain team to business technology, procurement, or innovation. The company is driven to enhance its people’s career prospects, nurturing and retaining valued talent.
- Making learning practical and tangible: The program would be rooted in Involvation’s tried-and-tested Value Chain Academy framework. “In parallel, we tailored the program to Rituals’ supply chain: Real strengths, challenges, and tasks that the brand’s supply chain team encounters at work,” adds Jeroen Scheepers, Partner at Involvation.
Tailoring the Supply Chain Academy
Involvation tailored Rituals’ Supply Chain Academy around a further key requirement: The content should be understandable for all levels of supply chain knowledge, while still engaging for those with the most.
Involvation shaped a three-part program for the Rituals team:
- E-learning modules for basic theoretical understanding of specific topics. Rituals selected topics including supply chain strategy, logistics, S&OP, and resilience.
- Foundation modules for learning in cross-functional groups. These covered the fundamentals of supply chain strategy and end-to-end supply chain processes (for example, logistics and S&OP), and practically mapped them onto Rituals’ reality.
- Essentials modules for deeper learning in specific teams, ensuring Involvation’s teaching applied directly to people’s roles at Rituals. “With Rituals’ S&OP specialists, we discussed integrated business planning, scenario and demand planning; with its logistics and supply specialists, we focused on warehouse automation and supplier relationship management,” explains Jeroen.
The Results: Rituals Supply Chain Academy
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Rituals is an especially agile, rapid-response organization, and the supply chain management team’s commitment to supply chain learning is clear: They completed the Involvation supply chain training alongside their employees, underlining its importance as a company investment.
Looking Ahead: More Learning & Development initiatives across Rituals
In early 2024, Rituals and Involvation reviewed the results of the first supply chain learning initiative. The plan is to keep iterating and co-designing to support continuous learning and improvement within Rituals, for the supply chain team and more widely.
The initial focus for 2023 was equalizing end-to-end supply chain knowledge across relevant employees, to best support Rituals’ rapid growth. In 2024, the plan is to run two Involvation Academies in parallel:
- The supply chain-specific edition for any employees who haven’t yet completed it
(featuring new advanced modules in 2025)
- Deep dives into specific topics where needed
Rituals is also motivated to expand Involvation’s Academies and continuous learning approach to other business areas. This has already prompted the introduction of cross-functional masterclasses within Rituals Business Technology.
Seven years in, the Rituals-Involvation collaboration continues to gain momentum, strength, and mutual commitment to continuous learning and talent development, in supply chain and beyond.
To find out more about shaping your supply chain learning program, contact Stefan Hoogervorst.
