Chris Lecrone Email & Phone Number

Richmond, VA, US

Dublin, IE

Atlanta, Georgia, US

Atlanta, Georgia, US

Tampa, Florida, US

• Responsible for the Purchasing and Storeroom / Inventory Management teams (29 employees) for 4 East Coast steel mills, including Services, Direct and Indirect Materials and Capital Equipment.
• Improved all major KPIs by collaborating with internal customers and driving policy compliance.
• Exceeded annual savings goal for 9th straight year at Gerdau.
• Storeroom improvement projects in 4 steel mills, leading to a 24% decrease (USD 1.1 million) in replenishment inventory, better asset tracking of off-site repairs and improved inventory accuracy.
• Coordinated Early Procurement Involvement in plant outage planning with Maintenance and Operations, leading to significant improvements in parts availability, contractor scheduling and budget compliance.
• Analytics to reduce non-Procurement spend by 67% (from 14% to 4.5%).

Tampa, Florida, US

• Managed the Services & By-Products Procurement team with 3 direct and 19 indirect reports and an annual spend of USD 450 million.
• Initiated a review of national and global suppliers to identify overlapping contracts, negotiating master service agreements with critical suppliers, standardizing the terms and conditions, improving payment terms and.
• Instituted automatic POs, allowing buyers to concentrate on sourcing, supplier improvement and policy compliance (annual ROI USD 1.2 million).
• Chosen to lead the first global Services sourcing team with responsibility for overseeing the sourcing of a USD 140 million category across 59 steel mills worldwide. The team achieved a USD 3.3 million cost savings by.
• ERP change management; established and implemented standardized, systematic processes to ensure consistency during the SAP rollout.
• Promoted safety by driving strict compliance to rules for contractors working on-site.

Tampa, Florida, US

• 1 of 3 managers hired to transition to a center-led Procurement organization.
• Managed the MRO & Services Procurement team with USD 400 million annual spend.
• Led Gerdau’s first global MRO sourcing team, identifying global savings in excess of 18%.
• Negotiated USD 6.1 million out of the annual cost of recycling steel by-products by aligning the expiration dates of the company’s disparate contracts and leveraging the spend, despite limited competition.
• Procurement lead on a project to de-commission two steel mills, resulting in under-budget cost mitigation.

Winnipeg, Manitoba, CA

• Streamlined the Sales process and enabled representatives to focus on new customers.
• Advised a cross-functional delivery team to ensure that quarterly sales goals were exceeded, contributing to the company surpassing its annual sales goal.
• Led an effort to consolidate quality, warranty, and customer satisfaction data, enabling production to rapidly pinpoint specific cells for improvement, reducing the number of initial quality claims by 11% over 6 months.
• Member of team that created a rolling sales forecast, combining projections from Production, Sales, Marketing, Procurement and Finance, and achieving near-term forecast accuracy of 95%.
• Assessed the impact of individual Marketing programs, allowing the organization to steer its resources toward events with the highest return.

Winnipeg, Manitoba, CA

• Hired full-time after demonstrating ability to promote change and implement efficient processes during summer MBA internship.
• Responsible for sourcing and purchasing assigned commodities for the firm’s manufacturing and aftermarket automotive parts businesses.
• Collaborated with Engineering to identify re-sourcing opportunities by targeting high spend parts with significant cost increases.
• Robust analytical skills led to the creation of a report to identify inconsistencies in purchasing patterns, resulting in an 18% improvement in purchase price variance for all commodities.

Winnipeg, Manitoba, CA

• Summer MBA internship.
• Reduced slow-moving inventory levels by 12%.
• Investment proposal for inventory management software with an ROI of USD 12 million and a 25% inventory reduction.
• Automated past due purchase orders, reducing time buyers spent expediting by four hours weekly.
• Identified the impact of U.S. steel tariffs on production costs and sourcing decisions, resulting in the creation of a team to minimize steel costs across all operating units.

Mba, Supply Chain Management, Finance

B.S. In Business Administration