“It’s all about the people. You can have the best strategies and be creative and innovative – if you don’t have the right people around you, you’re not going to succeed.”

– Reto Sahli, Group Chief Digital and Information Officer, HAVI

We sat down with Reto Sahli, Group Chief Digital and Information Officer at HAVI, to talk about the technology turnaround he’s led since joining the business – from diagnosing a fragmented, under-resourced function to building a network of global technology hubs spanning Chicago, Lisbon, Krakow, and Kuala Lumpur. We spoke about the thinking behind the location strategy, what it took to build culture and capability into each hub from the ground up, and the role senior talent has played in making that transformation stick.

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When Reto Sahli joined HAVI as GDIO, he inherited a technology function in the middle of a turnaround. Systems were failing, costs were high, and the business had no coherent technology strategy of its own – it was still reliant on services provided by its parent holding company. The mandate was to make HAVI’s technology organisation self-sufficient, and to do it fast.

HAVI is a market-leading global supply chain distribution and logistics business, perhaps best known as McDonald’s strategic partner across many regions of the world. As Group CDIO, Reto sits on HAVI’s executive committee, reporting directly to the President and CEO, a seat at the table that gave him license to rebuild technology from the ground up, not just to run it.

“There was a run challenge with these estates – too many incidents, too many failures. There was a cost challenge, of course. There was a strategy challenge – we didn’t really have a technology strategy.”

– Reto Sahli

Building the organisation first, strategy second

Reto is candid about the scale of what he found: fragmented processes, fragmented data, and people scattered across nearly every market HAVI operated in, each running on different systems and different ways of working. There was no lever to pull a strategy through, because the organisation itself wasn’t built to deliver one.

“Normally you would start with a strategy,” he explains. “But in HAVI’s case, I started with the organisation, because we just didn’t have the levers to even get a strategy implemented.” That meant beginning with a location strategy – a data-led exercise that evaluated 140 different dimensions across talent pools, cost, political stability, and market presence to work out where HAVI’s technology capability should actually sit. The answer was establishing Chicago as the headquarters, Lisbon as the European hub, and later, Kuala Lumpur to complete round-the-clock global coverage.

Eton Bridge Partners has worked alongside Reto and his leadership team throughout this journey, supporting the build-out of technology leadership across each of these hubs.

“We defined some key criteria – we only wanted to go into countries where we have a market, where we have a business, where we have political stability… and where the talent pool is big enough and promising enough.”

– Reto Sahli

From serviced office to Centre of Excellence

The location strategy triggered a full reorganisation, ramping down headcount in the individual markets and ramping up in the new hub locations, role by role, layer by layer, starting with Reto’s own direct reports and cascading down through the organisation. In Lisbon alone, that meant defining around 150 roles to build in the hub and roughly the same number to retire in-market.

Reto remembers the starting point well: a serviced office in Lisbon that was barely populated, with no infrastructure and no identity of its own. What’s been built since is a functionally-led operating model with dedicated Centres of Excellence for automation, integration, and testing, all sitting under one roof, alongside a target operating model that gives functional business partners end-to-end accountability from ideation through to retirement.

This is where Eton Bridge’s role went beyond search. It wasn’t a simple brief to fill. It was, however, clear it was to help build an identity, a culture, and a leadership bench capable of carrying that identity forward, across multiple hubs and markets simultaneously.

“The team at Eton Bridge Partners took the time to listen, to understand, and approach it from a culture point… we wanted to build something in Lisbon for Lisbon, and something in Kuala Lumpur for Kuala Lumpur.”

– Reto Sahli

Reto is direct about what set the partnership apart from other search firms he tried. Eton Bridge did the groundwork, before a single candidate was put forward. “That’s another success factor for Eton Bridge Partners” he says. “You didn’t flood us with CVs; we got the CVs that were really worth looking into and interviewing.”

The talent requirement was specific and not easily solved by proximity alone: L1 and L2 hires needed a genuinely global profile, people capable of operating across HAVI’s international footprint, not simply based in Lisbon. Eton Bridge sourced against that brief across the leadership team, and the relationship extended well beyond the Lisbon hub itself – into strategic hires across Sweden, Poland, and further afield in Europe, in spite of Eton Bridge having no physical office in any of those markets.

The results: A self-sufficient technology organisation, at scale

Two years on from the original build, HAVI’s hub strategy has matured into a genuine transformation engine:

• A functioning multi-hub model – Chicago as headquarters, Lisbon as the European hub with dedicated Centres of Excellence, and Kuala Lumpur completing the round-the-clock global footprint
• Around 260 positions built out, the majority now filled, with headcount rising toward c.400 as Kuala Lumpur scales and insourcing increases
• 18 senior leadership hires to date, including Lisbon, Sweden and Poland, none of them in markets where Eton Bridge has a physical presence
• A tech hub with its own identity and brand – one that competes for talent against a growing wave of GBS (Global Business Services) organisations moving into the same market

“We joined HAVI in celebrating their move into a brand new office, and we’re delighted with the success the Lisbon Tech Hub has had.”

– Jean-Pierre Green

A real understanding of culture and market 

What comes through most clearly in Reto’s reflections isn’t the mechanics of the location strategy or the operating model – it’s the insistence that none of it works without the right people, hired the right way, for the right reasons.

That’s the thread running through HAVI’s transformation and through Eton Bridge’s role in it: a search partner willing to do the work of understanding a market and a culture from the inside, rather than exporting a template from London – building each hub, in Reto’s words, “for Lisbon” and “for Kuala Lumpur” rather than as an interchangeable outpost.

“It’s the culture, it’s the ecosystem, it’s the government, it’s the authorities,” Reto reflects. “It’s growing it from the inside, versus coming as expats and creating something global, international, whatever. It’s growing it in Portugal for Portugal.”

Careers, Reto says, are rarely a straight line and neither, it turns out, is a global technology turnaround. But three hubs, hundreds of roles, and a self-sufficient technology organisation later, HAVI’s is a case study in what a search partner can deliver when it’s treated as part of the transformation team, not a vendor at the end of it – building senior talent in step with location strategy and operating model design, hub by hub, market by market, alongside Reto and his leadership team.

“It’s been a fantastic partnership over the past three years, and we are looking forward to the next chapter with you and with HAVI.”

– Jean-Pierre Green

If your organisation is scaling international technology leadership, building out global capability hubs, or needs support with hiring senior digital talent, contact Jean-Pierre Green and Eton Bridge Partners to start a conversation.