Alex Stephens Email & Phone Number

Portland, Oregon, United States

Beaverton, Oregon, United States

Led global cross-functional operations team dedicated to managing supply chain during macro disruptions, including COVID-19, Red Sea, and exit of brand partnerships. Focused on balancing business, marketplace, and environmental impacts.- Developed and managed corporate supply chain COVID-19 offense. Coordinated 12 functions and 30+ senior leaders to sequence actions that prioritized key products, reduced buys, and simplified assortment, stabilizing supply flow and rightsizing inventory levels. Team won 2022 Maxim Award (Nike’s highest team award). - Executed clean and on-time exit of Nike’s partnership with signature athlete (largest in company’s history) by managing down materials and inventory across different phases of production and finished goods; created playbook on executing similar situations in the future.- Acted as the business lead and analytics expert to co-develop planning’s first utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) to assist with forecasting and business management. Created the proof of concept, partnering with Tableau, that provided insights into business outliers with automated written summaries meant to align the executive team and drive decisions.- Worked with production teams to set up new material shipping lanes to UAE (overland transport through Saudi Arabia), mitigating impact to Jordan production, following Red Sea shipping closure; enabled the delivery of key apparel products that previously had production stopped.

Beaverton, Oregon, United States

Oversaw team responsible for scenario planning, defining health, and forecasting long-range inventory at business unit and global levels.- Developed long-range closed-loop planning tool (Sensi) that balanced demand and marketplace forecasts against inventory targets and closeout capacity to test fidelity of plans; in first cycle, tool identified significant units of excess production capacity, driving plan updates. Tool became core component of global forecasting process.- Enhanced inventory reporting to include elements like avg. sales price, marketplace inventory, and an overall blended health metric. This enabled the geographies to better manage closeout and purchasing decisions and land inventory levels against corporate stretch targets.

Beaverton, Oregon, United States

Established global process with finance partners that enabled senior leadership to monitor marketplace results and demand forecasts and make data-driven decisions to manage P&L and maintain healthy inventory levels.- Ran monthly global business planning and operations meetings with corporate leadership. Improved visibility into relationship between financial, demand / marketplace, and inventory forecasts, facilitating quick identification of risks and opportunities within plans (replacing less accurate method of relying on average growth rate alignment).- Implemented tiered KPI structure into Nike’s business planning process that aligned functional measures and targets against corporate hero metrics, ensuring teams understood and bought into overall corporate strategy.- Partnered with investor relations team to provide data and insights, in support of quarterly earnings release, strengthening relationship between operations, business outcomes, and financial results.

Beaverton, Oregon, United States

Managed 3 planning teams (Nike Sportswear Demand Planning; Footwear Supply Planning; Apparel Inventory Planning) over 18-month rotational assignment designed to provide experience in each segment and drive improved cross functional collaboration processes.- Developed and implemented product differentiation model that weighted each SKU according to confidence level; improved forecast accuracy and allowed planners to proportionally adjust plans instead of touching each record, removing time from plan refresh cycle.- Identified issue with planning system logic that was sub-optimizing buy cadence of marketplace energy footwear product. Partnered with technology team to generate solution for grouping purchases of key products, cutting air freight costs while maintaining on-time delivery levels.- Created closeout value matrix that compared point-of-sale (POS) average sales discount to current inventory, accelerating disposition of lowest marketplace value products; reducing average aged inventory levels and total closeout inventory percentage.

Beaverton, Oregon, United States

Led team responsible for creating, issuing, and monitoring product orders to ensure on-time production and delivery to the marketplace. - Represented North America planning as the subject matter expert (demand/supply netting) on the implementation of a new end-to-end planning system. Responsible for providing leadership updates and rolling out the new process to the team.- Developed new reporting and KPIs that gave visibility to the overall quality of each buy and enabled the team to fully audit the buy before final submission to the factories.

Beaverton, Oregon, United States

Responsible for the planning process and system configuration for the replenishment business, optimizing safety stock/inventory, service level, and how planners developed statistical forecasts.- Developed like style profiles that could be attributed to groups of products that had similar seasonality and statistical history, enabling the team to quickly model new products.- Set up a suite of standard safety stock policies that planners could assign to products that allowed better top down management/monitoring and reducing the risk of the accumulation of inefficient inventory.

Portland, Oregon Metropolitan Area

Post Logility go-live, managed the team responsible for the stabilization of buying process, new innovation to account for changes to work flow, and the management of all overseas production orders.- Created global production order process to align supply closer to marketplace demand, improving geographies supply / demand match.- Met with vendors domestically and overseas to negotiate SOPs that included vendor compliance, performance targets, and pricing.

Portland, Oregon Metropolitan Area

Planning subject matter expert in the implementation of Logility planning software, including system configuration, reporting, process, and change management/training.- Co-developed a new module that Logility commercialized as part of their suite of products called the Proportional Profile Planning Solution that allowed consumer goods to be planned at the style level and then proportionally disaggregated down to size using historic size curves. Allowing for accurate netting against inventory and in-flight production.

Portland, Oregon Metropolitan Area

Executed the buys and managed vendors and production at overseas factories.- Built new planning tools to accurately purchase products at correct size level, reducing liquidation of hash-sized products.