Annual Awards For Excellence

The Sir Robert Lawrence Award
(This award is not sponsored)

This award is the Institute's premier individual award to an individual who has made a sustained contribution to logistics and transport

And the winner is:

• Peter Surtees FCILT, Director European Supply Chain, Kimberly-Clark Limited

The recipient of this year's Sir Robert Lawrence Award, Peter Surtees was born in Newcastle UK in 1959 and spent his childhood & teens in Africa returning to the UK to complete his education.  His early career was spent in the 3PL industry working for a range of companies including Sutton & Sons, Robson's Border Transport, UCI Logistics and NYK. Joining Kimberly-Clark in 1994 originally as a logistics buyer, he has since held a number of key positions within Kimberly-Clark's supply chain organisation culminating in his current role as European Supply Chain Director - Consumer Products. 

Peter is responsible for Kimberly-Clark's physical logistics operations, sales and operations planning, customer service and demand planning organisations in Western & Central Europe, and leads the Order to Cash and Forecast to Stock process streams. Peter has pioneered effective collaboration between CPG companies for many years, and unlike those who have simply talked about it, he has successfully led large scale collaboration projects with Unilever and Kellogg's - where major infrastructure investments including design and build of combined/multi user warehousing projects and shared distribution fleets.

He is a founding Board member of ELUPEG (European logistics, users, providers & enablers group), sits on the UK ECR group and is an active member of a number of diverse industry groups promoting collaboration and supply chain innovation. Peter's vision, tenacity and his desire to innovate has enabled him to deliver significant and complex projects delivering very significant cost savings and service improvements.

His wide experience of both 3PL and in-house logistics operations has seen him pioneer in-sourced 4PL activities into a unique award winning European shared service centre in Brighton where the key components of the perfect order - manufacturing planning, inventory deployment, customer service and transport planning are seated together by country.  Having "wrung" the maximum benefit from this business model Peter has moved to leverage the KCE supply chain by putting it into a purpose built 4PL vehicle to leverage volume across other CPG companies in Europe. Peter's vision & infectious enthusiasm to constantly strive for ever more efficiencies & cost reductions has truly changed the face of the European CPG supply chain for the better.

Previous winners of the Institute's Sir Robert Lawrence Award

Back to list