On the evening of September 15, seventy senior leaders walked into the W Bogotá for the fourth edition of From Port to Pour. They came from consumer goods, pharma, energy, logistics, industrial manufacturing, telecom, insurance, hospitality and education. Some ran companies. Some ran supply chains. Some ran the people functions that staff both.
That mix was the point.
Port to Pour has always been built on a simple idea: the goods that move from a port to a customer's glass are only as good as the people who move them. In Bogotá, that idea stopped being a tagline and became the agenda. Talent, supply chain and procurement shared a single stage, back to back, in front of the same audience.
What came out of that room is worth writing down, because it says a lot about where supply chain leadership in Latin America is heading.
The Room Was the First Insight
Before anyone spoke, the guest list had already told us something.
Of the leaders who confirmed, roughly four in ten were CEOs, general managers or country heads. About three in ten led supply chain, procurement, logistics or operations. One in five led HR, talent or organizational development.
Five years ago, an evening about supply chain would have filled with supply chain people. This one filled with the people who decide what supply chain becomes: the executives who fund it, the functional leaders who run it, and the talent leaders who have to find, develop and keep the people inside it.
And they showed up. 103 leaders registered and 70 attended, a 68% turnout. That is the highest attendance rate of our last three editions (57% and 52% in the two before it), and it came on a Tuesday evening in a city where senior calendars are unforgiving. We read that as demand. Senior leaders are looking for rooms where the talent conversation and the operations conversation happen together, because in their day-to-day work they already do.
Talent: The Supply Chain Runs on People Decisions
The evening opened with the Talent Conference, led by María Fernanda Osorio, LATAM HR Manager at PiSA Farmacéutica.
Opening with talent was deliberate. Most supply chain events treat people as the closing slide. We wanted it to frame everything that came after.
The message that carried through the night: the hardest supply chain problems in the region are now people problems wearing operational clothing. A missed service level often traces back to a vacant planning role. A stalled digital project traces back to a leader who can sponsor technology but cannot translate it for the team. A resilient network traces back to a bench of people who have been trained to make decisions before the crisis arrives.
For talent leaders in the room, the implication was clear. The HR function that understands the supply chain's operating model, its critical roles and its succession risks is the HR function that gets a seat at the planning table.
Supply Chain: Resilience Is Built, Not Bought
The Supply Chain Conference was led by Santiago Jaramillo Amar, VP Supply Chain at Casa Luker, a company whose chain runs literally from origin to cup.
The conversation moved past the language of disruption. Everyone in the room has lived through enough of it. The more useful question was what separates the organizations that absorb volatility from the ones that keep getting surprised by it.
Our read, reinforced throughout the night: resilience lives in design choices made long before the disruption. Clear decision rights. Leaders placed close to the operation. Planning teams trusted to act. Data that people actually use. None of it is bought in a software license. All of it is built, one leadership decision at a time.
Procurement: From Cost Center to Strategic Lever
The Procurement Panel brought together Julián Londoño, Corporate Purchasing and Negotiations Manager at Grupo QBCO, Lina María Molina, Founder and CEO of Zinnia Global, and José Carlos Da Silva, GBS Hub Bogotá Lead at Kenvue, with Johanna Tarazona as host.
The mix of perspectives mattered: a corporate buyer, an entrepreneur and a global business services leader. Between them, they covered the full arc of how procurement is changing in the region, from negotiation table to shared-services hub.
Procurement is being asked to deliver savings, supplier resilience, ESG compliance and speed at the same time. The leaders who manage it are no longer the ones who negotiate hardest. They are the ones who understand the business well enough to know which supplier relationships to protect, which to challenge and which to build from scratch. That is a different profile from the one most organizations hired for ten years ago, and it is one of the profiles we are being asked to find most often right now.
AI Was in Every Session, Not on Its Own Slide
Artificial intelligence was one of the evening's four focus areas, but it never needed its own session. It showed up in all three.
In talent, it showed up as a hiring criterion. In supply chain, as a planning capability. In procurement, as the tool changing how teams source, analyze spend and manage risk.
That is how AI is actually arriving in Latin American operations: not as a separate transformation program, but as a fluency expected of every senior leader. This mirrors what we see in our search work across the Americas. The candidates who stand out are not AI specialists. They are operators who can explain, in plain language, how they have used AI to make a better decision faster, and how they brought their teams along.A Note on Format and Presentation
A clean, single-column reverse chronological format is the best format for a supply chain resume in 2026. It parses correctly across all major ATS platforms and gives recruiters the clear career progression they look for at every level. SCOPE
For senior candidates, we would add: length is not the issue people think it is. A VP or CSCO resume that runs three pages and uses every line to demonstrate specific impact is more useful than a two-page resume that achieves brevity by removing the evidence. What we want eliminated is not length, it is the space that currently holds descriptions of responsibilities rather than evidence of results.
The header summary matters more than most candidates allocate attention to it. Three to four lines that name your specific expertise, your scale of operation, and one or two of your most significant outcomes will do more commercial work than a two-paragraph narrative that tries to cover everything.
What the Guests Told Us
We asked guests for their honest take after the evening. A few responses:
"Excelente evento! Un encuentro maravilloso entre personas altamente profesionales y humanas." - María Fernanda Osorio Correa, PiSA Farmacéutica
"Cada evento es mejor que el anterior. El panel y las conferencias muy relevantes y con temas de impacto, además de la oportunidad de generar conversaciones y alianzas con personas de tu sector es invaluable." - Carol Vivas, IFF
"Felicitaciones por un evento impecable." - Germán Torres Lara, Marsh
"Evento muy distintivo del sello y ADN por el cual Lean Six Search quiere destacarse dentro del mercado de headhunting. Es muy valioso contar con la presencia del CEO de la firma." - Andrés Gómez Arroyave, Eterna
We share these not as applause, but because they point to what senior leaders value most in a room: relevance, people worth meeting, and conversations that continue after the last toast.
Two Questions Worth Asking This Week
1. If your most critical supply chain role opened tomorrow, would your talent team know what "great" looks like for it? If the answer depends on one person's memory, the gap is already there.
2. When did your HR, procurement and supply chain leaders last sit in the same room to talk about the same risk? Port to Pour exists because that conversation is still too rare. It does not need to be.
An Invitation
Port to Pour IV was made possible by our Golden Sponsor, Buk, and our partners Libertario Café, PiSA, Golden Occasions and Art of Procurement. Thank you to the W Bogotá team and to every leader who gave us their evening.
The conversation does not stop in Bogotá. If something from Port to Pour IV resonated, or if your organization is reviewing its leadership structure or facing a critical talent decision, connect with our team for a confidential conversation at leansixsearch.com.
Want to be in the room for the next edition? Write to hello@leansixsearch.com with the subject line "From Port to Pour: I want to attend."
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