Mills River, North Carolina, United States
🔷Accomplished operations director with extensive advanced manufacturing engineering, supply chain, and new product development experience at internal and external manufacturing sites globally. Extensive experience developing global manufacturing strategies and building out capacity and teams to execute and support. 🔷Known for the Ability to identify problems and quickly develop and implement successful solutions while performing effectively despite changing priorities and business conditions. Able to maintain high-level initiative and problem-solving capabilities within a complex environment while working collaboratively with team members across the organization, as well as with senior-level leadership on key initiatives. Extensive experience in semiconductor and electronics manufacturing and installing and managing manufacturing capacity at tier-one EMS providers.
Forterra is an emerging technology start-up that provides ground autonomy systems for commercial and defense customers. Working with tier-one contract manufacturers and third part logistics companies, I developed scaleable manufacturing, distribution, reverse logistics, and repair capacity for Forterra’s suite of sensor, signal, and compute devices. I led a cross functional team to execute the production transfer and manage the CM relationship. I am building out an organization that will co-locate with the CM to provide operations, factory planning, supply chain, and manufacturing and test engineering support.
Work with 8 internal and 3 external manufacturing sites to build out manufacturing capacity, manage new product introduction, transfer capacity, and uplift the manufacturing technology to drive quality and productivity improvements in North America and Asia, and Europe. Managed $25M capital budget across three business units within the division with total revenue of $1B. Function as value stream manager for products transferred to contract manufacturers. Reported to the Vice President of Operations for the Laboratory Equipment Division. • Designed and installed 1st automated cold storage production lines which included high-pressure polyurethane processing and integrated manufacturing execution systems at sites in North America and Asia. • Program leader for STP2 ULT transfer to Suzhou consisting of a series of ultra-low temperature freezers from Asheville to internal site in Suzhou, China. • 260 SKUs transferred. Project Budget $6M. Core team of 12 people located in China and in the US. • Locally made NMPA / FDA Class 2 certified and SNAP compliant product enabled volume increase at Suzhou site from 4,000 units/year to 8,000 units/year with lead time reduced by 8 weeks. • Reduced product cost 25% by reduction in labor and overhead and material cost reduction through the use of high level sub-assemblies produced at external suppliers. • Service call rate reduced 20% vs. same product made on the legacy process enabled by process control improvements. • Program leader for bench top lab equipment production transfers from sites in China to sites in other ASEAN countries. Over 160 SKU’s transferred, production volume 4K units per month, global distribution, project budget $4M, Annual revenue from transferred products $8M with gross margin ~ 45%. Built in-region team to manage transfer and provide sustaining factory planning, quality, and product engineering support the contract manufacturer.
Reporting the Workflow Solutions business unit operations director, I built 30-person global Advanced Manufacturing & Service Engineering organization tenable new product introductions, capacity transfers, and sustaining manufacturing engineering at internal and subcontract sites globally. Products included voice-activated mobile computers, scanners, headsets, and IoT devices. • Implemented core team approach to successfully launch 3 new product lines with yields at launch >95%. • Consolidated manufacturing operations of 3 recently acquired companies to external sites in Mexico and China. Lowered inventory levels by 23% while improving manufacturing cost by 12%, and quality by 8%. First pass yield increased to 98%, Out of box fails rate (DPPM) decreased by 8% and landed at less than 1%.