Linda Luna Email & Phone Number

Newport News, Va, Us

Newport News, Virginia, United States

Responsible for the overall development, implementation, and progress of strategic business goals for categories.• Insures vendor and product alignment effectively services the business needs.▪ Selects and manages relationships with suppliers to ensure the organization receives appropriate standards of service.▪ Promotes partnership, effectiveness and lean opportunities with our vendor community.▪ Ensures relevance to offering by selecting suppliers, products, and services to meet or anticipate customer expectations.▪ Develops strategies to execute at the lowest net landed cost and optimum price.• Provides selling strategy direction and recommendations for respective categories.• Maintains awareness of the competitive landscape and develops strategies to win.• Assists Supply Chain with inventory and demand planning to achieve industry leading fill rates.• Helps drive customer acquisition and profitable growth.• Produces customer facing products (catalog, mailers, fliers, ebix, etc) to attract and retain customers.

Greater San Diego Area

Responsible for managing the strategic sourcing process and leveraging the collective buying power of the University to reduce costs and improve quality of services.• Analyzes, negotiates and implements multi-year strategic alliances with suppliers• Performs ongoing supplier relationship management• Ensures UCSD's compliance with contractual obligations• Markets and Promotes strategically sourced contracts and the buying portal to achieve overall savings in cost of goods/services and process efficiencies• Oversees and directs data mining and spend analysis activities

Greater San Diego Area

Senior Manager, Program Development – Merchandising (7/2015 – Present)Provide leadership across three categories, Millwork, Raw Materials and Merchandising, managing programs and projects. Work collaboratively and liaise between IT and Merchandising to gather ideas to build strategies to successfully take products to market.▪ Achieved top lines sales growth of 10% on Millwork category through strategic planning, marketing strategies, product assortment, and pricing strategies. ▪ Analyzed sales data to track profitability, customer buying patterns, industry sales penetration, regional market performance, and vendor efficiencies to optimize product assortment.▪ Manage vendor relationships to facilitate negotiation of beneficial terms, rebates and co-ops funds.▪ Perform astute research to source cost effective products while maintaining quality together with conducting price reviews to achieve profit goals; secured annualized reduction in cost of $300K in 2015.▪ Deliver astute product management of raw materials, holding responsibility for the sourcing of 1,700 raw materials. ▪ Increase speed to market for new manufactured items by working with Product Managers, IT, and Manufacturing teams to ensure system functionality and capacity are in place to support new programs. ▪ Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) to the national sales force of 1300, providing product specifications/updates, customer leads, and seasonal sale trends.

San Diego

Senior Manager – Data Management for Merchandising (5/2011 – 7/2015)Led the establishment of a new department focused on streamlining internal processes between merchants, logistics, sales and customer service. Developed data management systems to manage and report on material data. Developed from scratch all processes, procedures and SOPs and built a high-performance team of 25 staff.▪ Streamlined process and system for material data creation, working in partnership with IT, Data Governance, Customer Service, EH&S and Supply Chain; projected annual savings of $400K.▪ Devised annual catalog schedule and designed a platform to document catalog sequencing, pagination and layout., creating a repeatable, scaleable process.▪ Created platform for maintaining Material Relationships (cross selling of materials) that was fed to BI Reporting, Salesforce.com and corporate website, resulting in annual increase of $1.6M top line sales.▪ Ensured data integrity by establishing processes to identify, rectify and prevent data quality issues. Integrated a third party platform to enhance material data.▪ Worked collaboratively to develop systems and processes driving greater efficiency and quality of data management including creating a new EDI platform (with $408K in annual savings), an automated freight matrix, Supplier Portal. Served as IT testing and review board.▪ Received President’s Excellence Award in 2011 for outstanding leadership in data management .

Product Manager – Faucets (5/2002 – 5/2011)Held responsibility for $161M category, defining and implementing strategies and initiatives to successfully drive revenue growth of 18% and increase in margin dollars of 18.5%. ▪ Consistently researched and analyzed market to identify opportunities to reduce costs while maintaining quality and capitalize on cost-out opportunities through direct import programs that resulted in $2.5M reduction in costs▪ Drove increased proprietary branded faucet sales by 263%, from $4.4M to $20.4M within 5 years.▪ Delivered astute management of the integration of 3 acquisitions into the product category, including strategic refinement of assortment, vendor negations and market pricing.▪ Champion new product research and market introductions to enhance and capture vertical sales opportunities, growing the commercial and specialty faucets from $356K to $3.7M through analysis and understanding of the hospitality market▪ Provided MDM/SAP subject matter expertise for Oracle to SAP transition, delivering skilled analysis of system requirements and business requirements to identify and resolve potential issues and streamline processes, resulting in significant reduction in order processing time.

Bsba, Marketing, Cum Laude

Education record

Activities and Societies: Honor Society, French Club

Education record

Education record