Twenty-five years of senior leadership across finance, operations, commercial and organisational change, built in mining, manufacturing, industrial and logistics businesses. Andrew combines commercial discipline with a focus on improvements that can be measured, and works alongside leadership teams to turn strategy into practical action.
Andrew Swan brings extensive senior level experience across finance, operations, leadership and organisational change, combining commercial discipline with a strong focus on delivering measurable improvements. He works collaboratively with leadership teams to turn strategy into practical action, strengthen performance, and develop the people and structures needed to deliver results.
His career has been built in demanding industrial environments. As Regional Executive Manager for Bridgestone Mining Solutions Australia, covering Queensland and the Northern Territory, he held full profit and loss responsibility across multiple branches, together with capital, safety, industrial relations and governance. Before that he led the Queensland business of Australian Aluminium Finishing as General Manager, and ran national sales for the Structural Tube Division of Smorgon Steel across Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific.
An engineer by training, with a Bachelor of Engineering with Honours in Materials Science from the University of New South Wales and a Graduate Diploma in Professional Accounting, he pairs technical understanding with commercial judgement. That combination suits briefs where an operational problem cannot be separated from its numbers, and where the leadership team needs someone who can work across both.
Andrew has carried line responsibility in each of the sectors below, in businesses where safety, industrial relations and asset intensity are as material to the result as the commercial performance.
Andrew's offering runs from the commercial and financial performance of a business through to the operational detail and the people who deliver it. Each capability below is grounded in roles where he carried the profit and loss himself.
Financial performance, planning, analysis and commercially focused decision making. Andrew brings the discipline of a finance background to operational questions, so that the choices a leadership team makes are grounded in what they will actually do to the result.
Identifying inefficiencies and delivering measurable improvements in productivity, cost and service. Andrew has introduced LEAN techniques across multi-site regions through structured training programmes, lifting quality, efficiency and safety together rather than trading one against another.
Translating strategy into practical change and embedding improvements so they hold after the programme ends. Andrew works on the structures, processes and accountabilities that decide whether a change survives contact with the day job.
Leading teams, developing capability and creating high performing, accountable cultures, alongside strengthening controls, governance, policies and risk management. Andrew engages senior stakeholders, builds consensus and communicates complex issues clearly.
Andrew does his best work where an operation is underperforming, where change has to be led rather than announced, and where the leadership team wants the result proven rather than asserted.
Underperforming sites, high pressure situations, hostile industrial relations and conflict between functions. Andrew has spent his career in operations where the problem is commercial and technical at the same time, and neither can be solved on its own.
Productivity, profitability, service levels, safety performance, customer satisfaction, cost and operational efficiency. Andrew works to briefs where success can be demonstrated in numbers the business already trusts, rather than argued over afterwards.
Able to mobilise at twenty-four hours' notice, willing to travel fully and to relocate temporarily for a mandate, and equally comfortable on site, hybrid or remote. Useful when a situation has moved faster than the plan for it.
Available for interim, fractional and project engagements across the United Kingdom and Ireland, Continental Europe, Australia and New Zealand, North America, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, on site or remotely.
Three decades of operating roles in asset intensive Australian businesses, each carrying profit and loss responsibility, capital, safety and industrial relations alongside the commercial result.
Andrew partners with leadership teams facing underperforming operations, business improvement programmes, or a period where experienced leadership is needed to stabilise the business and deliver sustainable results.
Bachelor of Engineering with Honours in Materials Science, University of New South Wales. Graduate Diploma in Business, Professional Accounting, Edith Cowan University. Executive MBA studies at the Australian Graduate School of Management.
Download CV → LinkedIn profileIf you have a site or a region that is underperforming, a business improvement programme that needs experienced leadership, or an operation that has to be stabilised quickly, tell us in 25 minutes what you need. Andrew or one of our 40+ senior consultants will tell you honestly whether we can help.