That's where Tribe Recruit’s specialist Supply Chain, Procurement and Operations team came in.
A first-time partnership with a clear brief
Terms were agreed with Sigma’s Head Office in Australia in February 2026, marking the start of a new relationship for Tribe Group, and it landed squarely in the space we know well: supply chain and operations recruitment at volume, and at pace.
The brief wasn't for a single hire – Sigma needed a full leadership bench for their New Zealand Chemist Warehouse distribution centre operations, spanning five distinct but interdependent roles including:
Transport Manager
Demand and Supply Planning Manager
Quality, Compliance and Facilities Manager
Head of DC Operations
Project Manager, Distribution Centres
Each role carried its own technical demands, but together they form the operational backbone of a distribution centre: the people who keep product moving, compliant, accurately forecast, and properly resourced.
Getting even one of these wrong creates a bottleneck. Getting all five right, in a compressed timeframe, requires a recruitment partner with real depth in the sector and the capacity to run multiple searches concurrently without dropping quality.
Why volume projects need specialist recruiters, not generalists.
Multi-role, multi-discipline projects like this one are where the difference between generalist recruitment and a genuine Supply Chain specialist becomes obvious. It's not enough to source candidates against a job description. Someone has to understand how a Demand and Supply Planning Manager needs to work with a Head of DC Operations, or how the Quality, Compliance and Facilities Manager's remit will shape how someone approaches their first 90 days.
Tribe Recruit's Supply Chain, Procurement and Operations desk was built for exactly this kind of work. Head of Supply Chain, Procurement and Operations Daniel Percival took the brief and ran it as a single, coordinated project rather than five separate searches, which meant candidate pipelines, market mapping, and interview scheduling were managed holistically across the whole leadership team.
"Sigma Health came to us with a genuinely complex ask - build out an entire DC leadership structure in a market where they hadn't recruited before, and do it to a timeline that reflected how quickly the business needed to move," says Percival "What made this project work was treating it as one connected mandate rather than five isolated vacancies. We were thinking about how these leaders would need to operate as a team from day one, not just whether each individual ticked the boxes on a JD. That's the value we bring to volume projects: the ability to see the whole structure, not just the next role to fill" said Percival.
The outcome
Working closely with Sigma’s New Zealand leadership team throughout, Tribe Recruit successfully delivered against all five roles, providing the client with a fully resourced New Zealand supply chain leadership team.
This kind of outcome doesn't happen by accident. It was the work of a team with deep supply chain networks across New Zealand, an understanding of what "good" looks like at each level of a DC operating structure, and the project management discipline to run several searches in parallel without any of them slipping.
What this project demonstrates about Tribe Recruit
The Sigma project is a clear example of what Tribe Recruit's Supply Chain, Procurement and Operations team does well: taking on volume, multi-role mandates and delivering them with the same rigour and candidate quality as a single senior search. Whether it's a distribution centre standing up new leadership, a manufacturer scaling its operations function, or a logistics provider needing to backfill several critical roles at once, Tribe has the national reach and sector depth to execute.
For businesses expanding into New Zealand, or restructuring their supply chain function locally, the lesson from this project is straightforward: recruitment partners who understand supply chain and operations end-to-end, and who can run at volume without losing quality, make expansion projects significantly less risky.
If your business is planning a supply chain expansion, restructure, or needs to fill multiple operations roles at pace, Dan Percival and Tribe Recruit's Supply Chain, Procurement and Operations team can help. With teams in Auckland and Wellington and recruiting for roles nationwide, Tribe Recruit can help you find your people.