Kimberly-Clark: on track with its global business plan.

• Author: Heffes, Ellen M.
• Position: CFO INTERVIEW - Interview

Mark Buthman, senior vice president and CFO of Kimberly-Clark Corp., spoke recently with Financial Executive's Executive Editor Ellen M. Heffes about his role leading the finance organization of this 135-year-old, $16.7 billion, Dallas-based company that's transformed itself from a pulp and forest-products company to a health and hygiene company.

Right out of undergraduate school in 1982 Buthman looked for an entry-level job in a general finance position and began his career with Kimberly-Clark (K-C) as a cost analyst. He was hired as part of a financial rotational development program in a manufacturing facility in Memphis--at a time when the company was growing rapidly--and where he oversaw the global capital budget before he was 25 years old.

Now, 25 years later, he's still excited about his job. "I've had lots of opportunities in my career to not only do 'neat' finance things and get good, broad finance experience, but also good leadership experiences that touch even more parts of the business," he says. As CFO going on five years now (FEI member since 2000), he says he's stayed with K-C since it's given him the chance to build a career with one company and do things that other people often keep switching jobs for. While the bulk of his career has been in finance, he's had several operating assignments.

For example, he ran a small tissue mill, was finance director for a small software start-up, was part of a three-person team that coordinated the overall integration of the K-C and the Scott Paper operations following the 1995 merger, and was involved in many mergers and acquisitions as K-C transformed its portfolio. K-C, he notes, used to be in the airline business, was the largest cigarette paper manufacturer in the world and used to make postage stamps.

By the late 1990s, Buthman began taking on greater responsibility for managing the global finance organization--including leading the global SAP implementation. Many changes have occurred overall, he says, as the entire business portfolio was reoriented beginning in the 1980s. Read on.

Describe Kimberly-Clark.

MB: It's a company that's comprised of smart, hard-working people--who you enjoy spending time with--and who are very competitive and focused on winning in the marketplace. Back in the 1980s, when I joined the company, it was undergoing a transformation, establishing itself as a viable global consumer products company.

When Wayne Sanders took over as CEO in the '90s, he was committed to taking the transformation to the next level. We bought and sold a number of companies and grew internationally, through acquisitions and organic growth.

He saw an opportunity to build a business that was higher-margin and had higher growth characteristics than our historical performance. We also built a billion-dollar healthcare business, and we now have a strong heritage healthcare business in the surgical suite, making products like gloves, non-woven gowns, caps and shoe covers, and a growing medical-device business.

An interesting aside: all of the surgical apparel worn on the popular TV show "Grey's Anatomy" is supplied by Kimberly-Clark.

When Tom Falk became CEO in 2002, he refined the portfolio, setting the company on a course to take our performance to the next level. He introduced a long-range strategy we call our "Global Business Plan" that has really helped establish the company as a global health and hygiene leader. Most of our products are known as consumer products, but we have a large professional business--in the washroom and workplace business--and the healthcare business.

As first or second competitively in 80 of the 150 or so countries in which you do business, how does K-C keep its edge?

MB: Our single biggest challenge has been the amount of commodity and energy inflation over the last...