As the purchasing manager, my primary focus is procurement but I'm also involved with inbound transportation, inventory management, and supporting the other operational groups at OrthoCanada. My goal is to keep the supply chain end of the company working smoothly.

My primary job is to forecast demand for an array of products that I manage, then place orders to cost effectively meet future demand. I'm also responsible for managing those orders from placement to receipt. While it sounds quite focused I actually end up involved with a wide cross section of our business and a delightful array of randomness each week.

Cataloging and competitive pricing and promotion analysis were the name of the game. After market automotive parts have complex parts compatibility that must be taken into account for setting up our own electronic parts listings, which also need to be factored into competitive pricing system. During my time here I would work on a project to provide the initial information and checking for our automatic price correction system. I also trained some junior employees.

I volunteered with Aventus Films to partner with a long time friend of mine (Matthew MacDonald) to help Dale Windle bring his vision to the screen. Rulers of Darkness was the most involved movie project I've ever worked on. At the time of writing this, the movie is scheduled for release this year.As a result, I can now be found in the IMDB. If anyone asks, you now know that Jonathan Isenor. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm5167457/

Bach Simpson (A division of Wabtec) provides a variety of sensors and event recorders for the rail industry, among which are crash data recorders and a new product that ties digital video recording to those recorders. Both of those items tie for most technically impressive product I've supported to date.My primary role was to build a system which will provide NAFTA documentation, though I still spend a lot of time working in procurement and administration. During the transition into the Wabtec family I was on hand to back fill for some of the regular staff who were training at the corporate head office.

Salmon Plumbing and Heating hired me to fine tune their inventory system, which had implementation issues since its installation that were impacting their ability to process work smoothly. The only way to execute this sort of job is to get one's hands dirty, learn the parts and learn the work. After a year, I'm proud to say that the inventory system was left in a much better state than when I found. The stock codes were ordered, redundancies were eliminated, processes streamlined and the company was on solid footing for tracking inventory at the truck level.

My time at Neocon was spent working closely with both the production group and new product development group to support launching new projects as well as on going production. During my time here I would perform extensive amount of sourcing, purchasing and expediting while improving on existing processes. Somewhere during this time I managed to setup inter-modal rail service for scrap returns and coordinate a project to reduce our change over time by 12%.I can't think of anything I've done before or since that approximates the unique challenges of working in tier one automotive.

Supply Chain Manager at MMS is code for "one man department". Here I would cut my teeth on every single part of the value chain from quoting through billing. My manager trusted me to take on a small department and largely left me to my own devices. Over the course of four years I would cut the salable inventory down to 40% of what I started with, improve cash-to-cash time and fulfillment rates while managing a period of remarkable growth.

Learning the less-than-truckload, truckload and cross docking business from one end to the other. Literally doing anything that needs to be done from dispatching and planning to stacking pallets and scraping snow off the roof of trailers.