Mirko Loos

As Head of Material Group Management at Doka, Mirko Loos has been with the company for four years. Loos’s career started in 2002 in the automotive industry, at Daimler AG. After five years in automotive, Loos switched to information and analytics, working for RELX. In 2018, Loos joined Doka as Head of Procurement Category Indirect and has since moved onto the role he holds today. 

“I’ve been in the procurement industry all my professional life. I started in s technology and processes role to begin with, moving onto strategic procurement, where I have been working ever since,” says Loos.

He adds: “The industry is never the same; it always presents new challenges, new things to work on, so you have to adapt yourself to new circumstances all the time. You are not just driven by the internal stakeholders but also driven by the outside, from suppliers or the market. So you have to cope with new situations regularly, and that's quite interesting.”

Thomas Zsulits, on the other hand, is Director of Global Supply at Doka and has been with the company for six years. Prior to Doka, he has worked for many international companies – including Bosch and Mondi Group. Today, he is responsible for procurement at Doka and for the entire supply process, from suppliers to production sites.

“Procurement was not always my path,” says Zsulits. “I started my career as a technician, moving to sales, account management, product management and then strategy planning. I am now in supply chain management and procurement. The complexity of the tasks in the industry captivates me and how the function overlaps with many other areas.” 

What inspires you?

For Loos, seeing strategies work is what inspires him: “Coming up with a solution that works, that really inspires me; seeing colleagues develop great ideas which result in great outcomes is likewise inspiring,” says Loos.

Zsulits’ is similarly inspired by the same thing: “In today’s environment, one of my biggest motivations is the team I work with. The current situation has brought us much closer together and strengthened the function as a whole. Many factors have driven us out of our comfort zones and how we have dealt with them has brought us closer together, growing beyond ourselves.”

Future trends

Looking to the future, Loos says: “We can only hope for a pre-COVID-19 environment. For now we find ourselves in challenging times, and one of our main strategies is to try our best to ensure the future supply for Doka in all facets. We will battle the challenges of cost vs. environmental impact, as well as continue to drive the digital transformation of procurement.

“There are always new questions and new tasks coming to procurement, and we need to ensure we have the tools and answers to close that gap. We are facing very interesting times ahead.”

Agreeing with Loos, Zsulits adds: “When the crisis is over, what will that ‘afterwards’ look like? So we will be starting to have these interesting discussions to estimate what the world will look like.”

Read the full story HERE.