Creating effective digital solutions to intractable challenges is a business-as-usual activity for Dawn McCarroll, director of supply chain and business excellence at Helios Towers, a FTSE 250-listed telecoms tower company that provides mission-critical infrastructure to connect communities across Africa and the Middle East. It’s a senior leadership role she relishes.
“I love it, and the challenge is not letting up,” says McCarroll. “It’s a high-energy company. It’s a growing company. Its people are diverse. And Africa and the Middle East are such exciting parts of the world to operate in. The growth in our industry is almost unlimited.”
Helios delivers operations at nearly 15,000 mobile tower sites across nine countries in Africa and the Middle East, which power services for mobile network operators. In addition to its own staff, the company supports around 11,500 indirect contractors and partner staff, with over 80% of procurement spend directed to local suppliers.
McCarroll says Helios recently launched its Impact 2030 strategy, a five-year plan focused on continued growth in Africa and the Middle East. As part of this strategy, the company will use people, partners and technologies to boost digital inclusion. Supply chain processes will play a crucial role in this approach.
“At the heart of it all, we’re trying to connect Africa and the Middle East, which has a sincere intention behind it,” she says. “We’re making a difference to people, whether they’re a tribe in a remote part of the Democratic Republic of Congo or someone in Kinshasa, where it’s a huge, sprawling city with millions of people.”
Pursuing excellence
McCarroll has 30 years of experience in supply chain management, working in high-volume electronics manufacturing, business process outsourcing and telecoms infrastructure, where she helped organisations exploit the Lean Six Sigma process improvement methodology.
She joined Helios at the end of 2021 as director of supply chain, before moving into her current role, where she reports to Allan Fairbairn, who is chief technology and digital officer at the company. McCarroll heads supply chain operations across the group, including procurement, planning and warehousing teams.
“I’m in charge of making sure we’re on the right digital path, that we’re using our data in the right way, developing our people, and driving diversity in people leadership,” she says.
In mid-2025, she assumed additional responsibilities for business excellence. The company has already trained over 65% of its workforce to either green or black belt in Lean Six Sigma. Now, McCarroll is spreading this level of excellence to the company’s network of partners.
“That’s one of our must-win battles in our strategy for the next five years – to take what we’ve done in-house outside to our partners,” she says. “For scale, 80% of our 11,000-plus partners are in our operating countries. They’re the people who go out and build our towers and maintain our sites. Our commitment is to train 60% of these people in Lean Six Sigma principles in the next five years. So, that’s no mean feat.”
In addition to spreading best practices across the business, McCarroll says deploying technology is increasingly crucial to her role. She describes her leadership style as enabling, encouraging and direct. She says she’s pursuing excellence in the supply chain, suggesting this desire has steered the organisation in a digital direction under her watch.
“Even before I joined, there were great signposts. I could see the opportunity for better supply chain orchestration, which is something I was used to in my previous organisations. Helios was on the cusp of going from five markets to nine, and that level of expansion, again, was a great signpost to join,” she says.
“I could see there was a lot that could be done. There was also the people side of the role – first, giving people digital tools to do their jobs more efficiently, and second, giving them confidence to grow. I see AI and digital as confidence-givers, as well as making things easier.”
Building resilience
McCarroll recognises that delivering supply chain and operational excellence is far from straightforward for an organisation that operates across disparate communities in Africa and the Middle East.
Her team navigates many socio-economic and political challenges. However, the processes the organisation has established mean it is well placed to manage those demands. She returns to the example of the Democratic Republic of Congo, suggesting people might question how the company can operate effectively in a country often characterised by conflicts and crises.
“However, it’s an exciting place to work,” she says. “There are great growth opportunities. The ability to connect people in that country is a compelling reason to come to work every day. We operate in currency-volatile markets, and we’ve become adept at really pivoting to cope with those demands.”
“Africa and the Middle East are such exciting parts of the world to operate in. The growth in our industry is almost unlimited”
Dawn McCarroll, Helios Towers
McCarroll says the board was interested in building resilience and managing risk in its more challenging markets when she joined the firm. Her organisation helped the business achieve its aims in several ways. In some partner environments, the team worked to consolidate and reduce risk.
In others, the team expanded its portfolio of partners to increase its options. Whether it’s responding to the coronavirus pandemic, controlling the impact of the conflict in Ukraine, or managing regional fuel crises, McCarroll says the internal team and its external partners are a resilient bunch.
“We work in places with difficult terrain as well,” she says. “If you think about Madagascar, and how mountainous and hilly it is, we need to ensure we offer great uptime for our customers. Working with our partners to always make that a reality is an everyday opportunity. And we go at it together as one team, one business.”
Boosting performance
McCarroll says one of her biggest achievements since working for Helios is using technology to improve supply chain performance.
“As soon as I entered the doors of the company, I immediately started seeing how we could be more tech-enabled,” she says. “We were already on SAP Business ByDesign [ByD], and we were talking about moving to S/4Hana, which we got into seriously two years ago. We’re midstream on that fresh approach.”
The company’s finance team was a heavy user of SAP ByD. However, other functions were not fully leveraging its digital capabilities. With the move to S/4Hana, the company aims to establish digitalised supply chain operations, from customer processes to AI-leveraged warehouses, and onto risk, resilience and due diligence.
“I keep talking about supply chain orchestration, but that’s really what it’s about – removing all those silos and optimising across those different elements,” McCarroll says. “That’s a big achievement. I’m very proud of the entire business’s engagement in that process.”
Another big success is female leadership. When McCarroll started working for Helios, around 20% of the organisation’s supply chain leaders were women. While not unusual for the industry, she was keen to do more. Today, with her intervention, women account for 60% of first-level managers in purchasing, procurement and warehousing.
“It’s something that I’ve worked on deliberately with the support of the leadership team,” she says. “It’s not about picking females. It’s about ensuring that we’re advocating for female leaders. We’re creating opportunities, and if they’re the best person, then they’ll get the promotion and the job. If they’re not, then they won’t.”
McCarroll says Helios has a culture of promoting and developing talent from within, including certification in Lean Six Sigma through a leadership programme with Cranfield University. She says there’s an internal focus on development, partnerships with HR and regular succession planning. McCarroll wants to create a legacy of future leaders.
“The way I consider gender balance in the team is that it’s not necessarily a male-female thing, but about having diverse voices, thought leadership cultures, backgrounds and varying experience levels, which is something I’ve worked hard to curate. It’s a profound change.”
Integrating operations
McCarroll says Helios is eager to exploit emerging technology. The company uses data and AI for sales and operations planning, demand planning and to foster partnerships with commercial teams and customers.
“We’re doing a lot of heavy lifting with big data in S4/Hana,” she says. “We’re also on a path this year to leverage AI using SAP Ariba and other SAP products, which allows us to exploit tools for contract management, supplier performance management, everyday procurement and sourcing, and price scanning. You would need an army of staff to do what the technology in Ariba can do. We also use AI to scan for security risks and potential socio-economic issues.”
During the next 24 months, McCarroll will lead the second wave of the company’s S4/Hana deployment. She’ll also launch the firm’s partner programme, where partner employees across the firm’s markets will be trained in Lean Six Sigma. The approach has already started in Oman, as the maiden country for training.
“All of our partners out there are very receptive to it,” she says. “It’s something that’s an active reciprocity to long-term partners of ours to upskill their teams who work in our sites, day in, day out, to allow them to look at processes and problems exactly as we do. We want to create a seamless community.”
By the end of the decade, McCarroll anticipates her team will have created a fully integrated, end-to-end supply chain stretching from the customer’s first enquiry through to the commercial team assessing the opportunity, and onto the planning team allocating capital and procuring resources for the initiative.
“We want to execute that demand at the right time, in the right place, in the right quantity,” she says. “We want to be optimising inventory or warehouses with efficiency built in, leveraging AI all the way through to the material being dispatched out to our sites, building our towers, maintaining them for their lifecycle, and then, when technology has to be disposed of, it’s a digital experience – and then the cycle starts again.”