Executive
leadership.

I led a six-month turnaround project in a mill’s converting department, following a phase I had co-led there the previous year. The work covered inventory, scheduling, changeovers, overruns, lead times and machine economics, alongside gemba walks, product flow and correcting safety violations.

I established a project charter, named responsibilities and a team across shipping, converting, logistics, planning, data and IT. Weekly working sessions, biweekly performance reviews and monthly sponsor reviews gave the work a delivery rhythm. I kept it moving after the project lost its executive sponsor in April and presented the costed close-out to mill leadership in July.

Operating results and findings

Find where the problem is happening

I built a dashboard by machine and shift that showed where unscanned inventory was concentrated, giving the team a specific basis for coaching and follow-up.

Give sales usable lead-time commitments

I replaced calendar dates with lead times in weeks—two to seven depending on the line—compared them across the mill network and established a named owner and weekly update process.

Separate scheduling problems from production problems

Analysis of about 4,100 tons of gross overrun across 2,280 closed orders attributed 57% to scheduling and 43% to production. The balance differed by machine, pointing to different corrective work on each.

Bring customer-held inventory within target

The inventory workstream was completed with the stock back within its agreed targets.

Rebuild the economics from demonstrated performance

The existing costing still used older machine speeds. I rebuilt the costs using the preceding three months of demonstrated rates and current wages, then separated the value of a better production mix from the value of greater operating consistency.

The immediate recommendation used performance the mill had already demonstrated. The higher-rate scenarios showed the additional opportunity from improving consistency.

Make the right operating decision

The analysis showed that board lost while producing sellable output was consuming more value than the department’s conversion margin. It also identified a conversion step whose flat charge failed to reflect the effect of setup time on different order sizes.

I also showed how the mill could hold its inventory band by clearing identified base inventory, preserving profitable production volume that an output cap would have sacrificed.

I challenged the initial conclusion that one line should stop: at a rate the mill had already achieved, that line became profitable. I recommended fixing the rate performance before exiting the product. Leadership received a set of specific operating and pricing decisions, with the economics behind each.

I led planning as the network changed from 16 machine lines across 13 sites to eight lines across seven mills. Customer transitions were part of my standing responsibility from 2020, continuing through closures and divestitures into 2026.

Through three closures, I coordinated grade qualification and order transfers to receiving mills while the network also absorbed a 57-day outage at one mill and a seven-day outage at another. Equipment moves, staffing and training at a receiving site all had to fit around continuing customer orders.

Earlier, I had planned and executed an extended site furlough covering 45 colleagues, with customer communications, volume transfers and a machine-by-machine restart schedule. The later closure drew on that transition experience.

I redesigned the work, defined a senior role and progression path, promoted two planners and built a succession plan. Primary and backup responsibilities gave each mill coverage. A process-and-performance role helped improve the work across the team.

Across six years of change, one person resigned, in early 2021. The other changes in team size involved managed transitions, role consolidation and planned succession. The work continued through closures and divestitures; much of my leadership from 2020 to 2025 was remote across the United States.

My manager’s FY2024 review recorded year-over-year improvement in engagement and recognized that the team responded to my leadership. His assessments across the period repeatedly highlighted developing colleagues, sound decisions and the ability to lead through organizational change.

I bring that same responsibility to a client’s team: understand the people, define the work, give them the support to succeed and follow through when a difficult decision is needed.

I evaluated scheduling platforms against capability, cost, maturity and time to value, then built a 14-mill investment case for leadership. The modeled annual contribution-margin scenarios ranged from $8.7 million to $15.6 million against approximately $1.7 million in first-year cost.

My responsibility continued through integration, use cases, the first on-site launch, training, IT support handover and performance measurement. The program included twelve mill go-live workstreams.

1. Evaluate
2. Make the case
3. Integrate
4. Launch & train
5. Measure & support

A full-month parallel simulation at the first go-live mill showed 1.5% lower trim waste against a 0.5% target. I then built the recurring measurement of trim, reel efficiency and by-products by mill and month. That gave leadership a way to examine the case I had made against the system’s performance.

I also reviewed what the business paid for and used, reducing licensing and maintenance commitments as sites left the network.

I helped establish the processes, systems and organizational structure connecting demand, supply and business decisions. My experience across customer service, logistics, scheduling, S&OP and integrated business planning informed how those handoffs were designed.

The work included responsibilities, decision flow and the systems people would use—not simply a new meeting calendar.

I built a working application that turns open orders into cutting patterns, campaigns and machine schedules. It includes a cost model, scenario comparison and reviewable exports, with the mill’s physical constraints built into the optimizer.

Historical testing produced 60–80% lower modeled cost across every complete eight-week test window compared with actual historical cost. Each test calibrated the model using only information available before that point in time.

The investigation also found that cost coefficients changed by a factor of 2.6 within the historical year. I built rolling recalibration into the approach so that scheduling decisions could reflect changing operating costs. I prepared the executive case, live walkthrough and architecture handoff for evaluation as a replacement candidate.

A stock total cannot tell a plant what it can actually use. I built a load-planning tool that checks material eligibility, dimensions, weight, plant capabilities, demand and freight across five operating modes.

Unknown eligibility stays unresolved for review. An approval ledger consumes the allocated rolls so that a later proposal cannot allocate them again.

I also built an Excel VBA version and verified matching results across all five modes. Planners use it in the environment they already work in. Comparing stated demand with actual shipments also exposed roughly fourfold overstatement in demand assumptions, which were corrected.

I reconstructed 617 archived daily plans spanning two and a half years, then compared how each operating month changed as execution approached. A twelve-metric view connects each result with its definition, calculation and source.

Leadership could inspect where the plan remained unsettled and which inputs or decisions warranted investigation.

I reconstructed 28,274 grade runs and priced four scheduling behaviors against each mill’s own best demonstrated performance. The comparison gave leadership a costed view of where scheduling decisions were losing value and a practical basis for selecting the next improvement work.

The benchmark came from the operation itself: rates and results that its people and equipment had already delivered.

I built an internal knowledge assistant over a document and spreadsheet collection, with an index covering 5,043 spreadsheets and 8,512 sheets. It connects related records and supports retrieval across information that would otherwise require repeated manual searching.