Brian Ruwadi

About Brian

Brian leads McKinsey’s retail-operations work globally. Committed to operational improvements that drive sustainable growth in the retail sector, he has supported top companies as they pursue large-scale performance transformations.

Working across a range of retail and consumer-goods categories, Brian has advised executives in the apparel, grocery, food-service, and department-store sectors. To achieve notable improvements in performance, he oversees major transformation programs, addressing areas such as pricing and promotions, supply-chain efficiency, marketing and operational excellence, capability building, and performance management. In all cases, the operational transformation serves the dual goals of reducing complexity while also uncovering ways to drive profitability.

Examples of his work include the following:

• leading a business-wide performance-transformation program for a major grocer, capturing over $1 billion in margin improvement
• redesigning the supply chain for a multi-category retailer, producing significant reductions in markdowns and inventory while improving availability
• driving a multiyear operational-improvement effort at a major grocer, saving costs while improving product freshness
• running a big data commercial transformation at a leading grocer to drive better merchandizing and marketing decisions based on customer insights
• leading a multiyear commercial-improvement program for a large North American retailer, transforming category planning, assortment planning, vendor negotiations, pricing and promotions, and direct marketing
• guiding an end-to-end business transformation for a food-service and consumer-goods manufacturer, including building an improvement function to reduce complexity and find sources of value

With a long-standing passion for operations research and strategy, Brian has published his insights on retail economics and supply chains. Before joining McKinsey, he led the development of a regional bank’s customer-outreach program, where he built a best-practice approach, and then brought the people within the organization along on the journey to apply it.