Ken Litke Email & Phone Number

Anywhere

Life is a blessing

Greater Milwaukee Area

Responsible for Milwaukee Brewery and Craft Supply Chain including Watertown Hops, Tenth Street Brewery and Crispin Cidery facilities

Arden Hills, Mn

Responsible for all internal and external feed and dairy manufacturing including the integration of five manufacturing teams within two business units spanning 73 plants and 4000 employees. Responsibilities also included the Co-pack group and the Environmental, Health and Safety team.Accomplishments:• Created a safety culture that led to record low injury rates in all business units• Significant improvements in quality and food safety with record high internal quality audit scores• Reduced costs by $14MM in two years while absorbing over $20MM of cost increases

Arden Hills, Mn

Responsible for all functions across an integrated supply chain including manufacturing, quality assurance, logistics, sourcing, milk procurement, engineering, continuous improvement and environmental health and safety. The scope of this role includes 4500 employees, 74 manufacturing sites, 10 distribution centers, and an annual budget approaching $6 billion

Responsible for all supply chain activities within the Dairy Foods business unit including logistics, sourcing, manufacturing, customer service, engineering, and quality assurance.Accomplishments:• Reduced injury rates every year to record lows, well below industry average.• Improved food safety programs driving down product safety incidents by more than 80%.• Reduced COGS $24MM from plan in 2009 and $3MM from prior year.• Energy Council drove a 4% reduction in electricity and natural gas consumption.• Successfully completed ERP transformation enabling improvements in customer service (case fill > 99%, OTD > 96%), inventory levels (38 to 25 days), and truck utilization (35,000 to 42,000 pound average)

Responsible for 10 dairy plants that produce butter, margarine, spreads, natural cheese, processed cheese, dry cheese, whey and milk powders.

Responsible for coordinating all Guinness USA supply chain activities. The network included production in Jamaica, Ireland, England, Canada and the US. As a member of the Guinness USA executive team, I participated in the strategic plan enabling the business to become the fastest growing premium beer company in North America

Responsible for 7 plants including 4 natural cheese plants, a processed cheese plant, a cheese powder plant and a butter / spreads facility.

Responsible for various functions within the dairy foods supply chain including quality, logistics, and 3 plants.

Hired as Plant Manager of a Greenfield site 18 months prior to start-up. This new facility was designed to produce frozen breakfast products including Toaster Scrambles.Accomplishments:Line 1 started production on time and 25% below budget. Line 2 ahead of schedule and under budget.Implemented a Total Productive Maintenance program and 12 hour rotating shifts which allowed production employees to produce, clean and maintain their equipment.Hired 160 employees using behavior based interview techniques. The annual employee opinion survey placed the Geneva facility in the top 10 of 500 Pillsbury work groups for employee satisfaction scores.First plant in the company to implement a cascading sanitation schedule allowing for 24 hours of production prior to cleaning as required by the USDA.

Managed supply chain activities for a $700 million refrigerated dough business team. Served as the primary interface between the business team and the supply chain. Gained approval for a $50 million capacity expansion project that increased production speed 50% through new technology and doubled financial returns.

Responsible for all R&D activities on a refrigerated biscuit team. Functioned as R&D project leader for a multi-million dollar relocation of biscuit production to a new facility. Received a patent for a process that successfully applies twice the cinnamon filling despite several unsuccessful attempts by other teams.

Managed the Quality Assurance department for a large refrigerated dough facility. Responsible for food safety, pest control, product quality and sanitation programs.