Carl Knight Email & Phone Number

Greater Atlanta Area

Helping companies define value strategies and opportunities in pricing proficiency and excellence. Defining goals and KPI's to measure against for success. Determining approaches that balance risk/reward to enhance margin and grow top line. Setting practice, policy and process in place, managing change to ensure compliance and success.

• Through August 2017Managed pricing teams for Designed Structures & Solutions, a $500M business within PolyOne. Defined pricing methodology for 6 distinct product lines within business.
• Implemented pricing policies, improved profitability, lead time to quote, consistency, and professionalism of customer price communications.
• Directed implementation of price setting software, established first fully integrated configure, price, quote, order, and analytics process.
• Lead business to change from cost plus mentality to market segmented value based price setting and automation of confirmed quoted price on order execution.
• Defined profitability analysis methods, visualized and demonstrated pricing successes, devised warning signals, and guided business teams in pricing decision making.

• Established product management teams within the Designed Structures & Solutions business group. Identified and recruited team members.
• Trained group on product management skill sets, identified product and market groupings, developed value propositions, cleansed datasets, rationalized and reduced duplication in the product lines.
• Established price setting guidelines, collaborated with business leaders, commercial and marketing teams.
• Guided ERP implementation strategies (SAP) and provided business direction and requirements, unmasking manual pricing actions that previously eroded unit price.

• Identified and executed opportunities within the Designed Structures & Solutions unit for margin improvement based upon profitability analyses.
• Defined and segmented businesses, aligned with PolyOne product strategies in Healthcare, Transportation, Consumer Durables, Building & Construction, Packaging and Automotive segments.
• Implemented pricing analytics, quickly captured savings of $15M, based upon best practices.
• Augmented customer centric selling tools for commercial teams including better articulated solution selling.

• Lead member of Gross Margin Council, representing Global Color & Additives business.
• Engaged and influence international Color & Additives price and product management teams, identified key margin related issues, replicated best practices between regions in North America, European Union, Brazil.
• Uncovered opportunities through global perspective, leveraged product design in North America and reduced time to market for Global OEM’s in Electronics, Automotive, Healthcare and Packaging who were looking to produce.
• Awarded Marketing Excellence award for global collaboration efforts in pricing and price analytics, improving profitability.

• Founding member of global gross margin council for PolyOne, representing North American Color & Additives business.
• Improved gross profits by more than $10M by implementing first system-based price and quotation process, earning Chairman’s Achievement Award.
• Drove price targeting by developing control systems that utilized customer and product data.
• Drove profitability reviews to comprehend results, identify issues and develop project plans to grow profitability, resulting in more than 1000bps improvement in gross profits.
• Identified and developed rationalization strategies in product lines, improving operational costs and lean manufacturing results.

• Implemented product and pricing support to commercial and marketing teams for packaging and healthcare markets.
• Improved profitability more than 50% by implementing pricing policies for healthcare applications reflecting value and risk avoidance regulatory support services provided.
• Guided product development services, supporting growing these markets.

Lead voice of the customer for SD portion of SAP implementation during the merger of MA Hanna and Geon corporations to become PolyOne. Worked on design of customer database and product transactions for smooth integration of businesses.