Selected Work
Download ResumeI've spent my career jumping into new domains, coming up to speed quickly, and leaving my mark. I seem to attract undeveloped roles (or perhaps they attract me), and I relish the chance to dive in and mature my area and the groups around it. The work below reflects recent roles where I brought structure to ambiguity and drove better decisions - and the impact that followed.
Connecting a Broken Forecast
When I stepped into the role, we were over-producing and under-selling versus our forecasts - yet somehow beating our inventory projection. Meanwhile, A/P was a total wildcard, with no way to validate the outlook. I built a triangulation model connecting all the inputs and outputs, giving us a tool to challenge assumptions and dial-in the Inventory & A/P forecasts. With a trusted forecast, we could finally have meaningful discussions about actions and trade-offs.
- Improved forecast accuracy by 2 - 3 pts (Inv: $80M - $120M | A/P: $40M - $60M)
- Forced cross-functional teams to create connected forecasts
- Led to several efforts to drive actions to drive lower inventory & higher A/P
- Methodology adopted as the standard framework for performance and forecast reviews
- Established a smarter approach to forecast and budget targeting
Deciding When to Close a Plant
I joined a small team evaluating potential plant closures and quickly realized that the lack of rigor and unclear roles & responsibilities would lead to suboptimal evaluations on high-stakes decisions. I led the development of a business case framework: a standard financial model, data requirements and sources, analytical approaches, and phase-specific assumption standards. I also filled a leadership gap by advising project managers, creating project team RACI's, and setting clear expectations for the functional leads. With this framework in place, we developed clear recommendations based on ROI's, operational metrics, and risks - backed by well-defined execution plans.
- Drove two plant decisions (one closure, one transformation) with a third closure recommended
- Built the standard financial framework for future evaluations
- "Informal" work on roles & responsibilites incorporated into playbook by new leadership team
- Balanced technical rigor with executive digestibility
Building an Analytics Team from Scratch
As new tools like Alteryx & Power BI started becoming prevelant, I was tasked with building an analytics and automation team to serve the finance function. With little initial direction, I defined a mission, created an operating framework, and hired / upskilled a small team. Early wins were designed for team learning, to show value, and to build credibility, with the team quickly evolving to take on more challenging projects.
- Implemented process automation with tools like Alteryx, VBA, Power Query, and Power Automate
- Created dynamic Power BI dashboards to replace stale excel & pdf reporting
- Used machine learning algorithms to attempt to assign brand and category tags to 78,000 skus
- Integrated Asia sales and margin data into our qlikview reporting evironment