Hari Perumal Email & Phone Number

As the Chief Supply Chain Officer, I am pivotal in Fuerst Group, shaping and overseeing the global supply chain landscape across our companies and subsidiaries. With meticulous attention to detail, I navigate critical pathways to success, driving innovation in product design, optimizing merchandising strategies, ensuring seamless product availability, maintaining superior quality, maximizing inventory productivity, managing costs effectively, and ambitiously pursuing gross margin objectives.My leadership extends beyond supply chain operations, encompassing strategic collaboration with executive leadership across various organizational dimensions, such as customer engagement, IT, and distribution. By fostering seamless alignment between global supply chain teams comprising in-house manufacturing and third-party vendors, I ensure the realization of company objectives within budgetary constraints and established timelines. This comprehensive approach underscores my capacity to lead at the highest levels, demonstrating the qualities and understanding necessary to drive strategic growth and achieve organizational success.In addition to my core responsibilities, I collaborate closely with the company's founder and CEO to guide strategic initiatives in sales marketing and retail expansion. Together, we identify talent, recruit industry-leading professionals, and remain abreast of industry trends. Additionally, I play a crucial role in financial management, maximizing our EBITDA and underscoring my ability to contribute to the company's strategic direction while optimizing financial outcomes.Noteworthy achievements include driving a 50% year-over-year business growth during the challenging period of the COVID-19 pandemic for two consecutive years. Despite global supply chain constraints, I successfully elevated the gross margin by 700 basis points across all categories worldwide over the past three years, substantially contributing to the overall EBITDA performance.

As Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain, I managed our global supply chain operations' Profit and Loss (P&L). I spearheaded initiatives to optimize profitability by leveraging a combination of owned and contract manufacturing facilities worldwide. Through strategic decision-making and operational excellence, I ensured that our facilities were strategically located to maximize landed gross margins for the company.At the forefront of innovation, I led the charge in product development, pioneering new business categories and driving growth for our brand. By staying ahead of market trends and consumer preferences, I created opportunities for expansion and market leadership.With a global perspective, I oversaw diversified operations across critical regions, including China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, India, Romania, the USA, and Mexico. This geographical diversification was strategically designed to enhance landed margins for all subsidiaries and headquarters, ensuring sustained profitability and competitive advantage in the marketplace.As part of a strategic initiative, I relocated all production operations from China to other Asian regions to mitigate the risk of additional import tariffs. This decision resulted in a significant increase in landed margins for the company, with improvements of up to 500 basis points.

VP - Global Technical Operations Responsible for strategic planning and execution of "owned" manufacturing and operate as profit centers. Responsible for Global Supply Chain including contract manufacturing factories for quality, delivery and gross margins. Manage all global innovation to create compelling products to create new categories and markets to grow the business.Head of Manufacturing and Sourcing Feb 2009 - 2015Responsible for all brands (KEEN, CHROME, OVERLAND) under Fuerst Corporation in all aspects of Global sourcing, manufacturing, supply chain, product margins, advanced concepts development, commercialization and quality.- Set up global organization structure to source for multiple brands- Establish sourcing supply chain to ship products at the best landed cost for USA and International subsidiaries - Manage Advanced concepts and Innovation drive to bring industry changing products to market

Union City, California, Us

Director of Manufacturing 2004 to Jan 2009 Responsible for all manufacturing operations including production, quality, engineering, materials management, testing, and commercialization; promoted to lead corporate manufacturing and operations teams at 11 manufacturing factories worldwide; key player in revenue growth from $20 million to $180 million during my tenure.* Successfully commercialized 200+ skus per season in 11 production facilities and achieved less than 1% returns level through Six-Sigma initiatives.* Evaluated and selected new suppliers with cost, quality and delivery parameters, while still maintaining optimal number of suppliers to keep supply chain efficient; improved gross margins by 10 percent over three years.* Consolidated suppliers/materials for efficient supply chain; achieved 12 percent improvement in cost savings. * Introduced continuous improvement tools for materials and processes both at the supplier and OEM level to monitor and measure results which reduced rework rates by 5% during final inspection.* Successfully developed and implemented quality systems, process controls using statistical tools to meet product specifications; reduced customer returns to less than 0.7 percent – well below industry standard of 2 percent.* Successfully received product certifications from International regulatory bodies for safety products in Canada, USA, Europe and Australia from CSA, ANSI, CE and ASA respectively.Director of Commercialization 1998 to 2004 Responsible for all activities related to taking a prototype into production in overseas manufacturing locations. Established key performance indicators, major milestones, critical path, productivity improvements, and cost-reduction programs that consistently improved product output, product quality, on time product launch and customer satisfaction

Auburn Hills, Mi, Us

Responsible for designing and instituting leadership-enhancing training program for body shop unit; established TQM process in this plant to promote the culture of continuous improvement. * Reduced process variables in Body-in-White (BIW) unit to decrease rejection levels by more than 40 percent.* Decreased setup time by 8 percent by initiating lean manufacturing processes utilizing SMED principles.* Extensively deployed visual aids and trained 150 employees to reduce process variations at each workstation in BIW during conversion from batch manufacturing to TOYOTA KANBAN lean manufacturing methods.

Responsible for corporate goals through strategic planning, operations management, and resource development. * Prepared business plan for start-up business unit; brought product out from production line in just two months.* Achieved 15 percent reduction in packaging and raw materials costs through product re-engineering.* Radically improved customer delivery times and product quality by forging regular communications and better understanding between marketing and production personnel.* Partnered with vendor to support and encourage their attainment of ISO 9002 certification, contributing to their growing industry reputation as a quality supplier.

Responsible for developing and implementing quality assurance programs for manufacturing facilities utilizing TQM principles; managed 40 professionals and oversaw production and quality for eight contract manufacturing factories.* Quadrupled production capacity in overseas facility during this period through manufacturing efficiency and capacity planning with individual contract manufacturing factories.* Achieved ISO 9002 compliance for 3 manufacturing factories through successful quality systems in place.* Extensive knowledge in Root Cause Analysis, SPC, TQC, 5S, Kanban, and SMED.* Achieved better design through cross functional interaction and quality function deployment that lead to efficient designs reducing the learning curve by up to 15 percent.* Structured approach to issue recognition through Pareto analysis led to solving top five issues for the company that solved 80 percent of the issues.

Mba, Supply Chain Management

Ms, Computer Information Systems/Quantitative Business Methods

Bs, Mechanical Engineering