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Full P&L and Management control

I was recruited to GCA to perform a variety of financial operations and management functions, with overall responsibility to drive process discovery, and both redesign and improve back office and customer facing financial functions in the Commercial Division. I am charged to act as a change agent to lead the Division to stronger process, systems and people development while building positive relationships with customers and the operations and sales teams. My role is also accountable for ensuring the A/R structure is aligned and contributing to the current business strategy; formulating credit policies and procedures; developing and overseeing the process for the review of customer contract terms and conditions for profitability and feasibility; directing the AR reporting and budget programs; ensuring that AP meets key functional metrics; and directing the staff to monitor and update the customer and vendor master as well as the contract repository and pricing. I was also recruited to lead and staff the division financial operations function, while encouraging and supporting both a strong service and cost control from the financial operations staff.

In this role I was responsible for most business processes pre and post-sale reporting directly to the President, Americas. I lead the Credit Department, Order Entry Department, Inside Sales Team, Technical Services Department and the Customer Service Department. I had 6 direct reports and upwards of 170 indirect reports managing a budget in excess of $6MM. I created an environment that is making TTI and easy place for both the consumer and commercial customer to do business. I eliminated many process difficulties that have been created over time by competing departmental interests. I created a metrics driven organization that is focused on customer satisfaction while increasing company profitability. I addition to my normal duties, I was a leader on the ground team for the acquisition and integration of Oreck. I was charged with and successful in ensuring acquired financial assets were secure, cash management processes were established, business processes continued without interruption, employee transitions were completed and ensured that customer disruption was kept to a minimum.

In this role I retained leadership of the Credit department after promoting a new Credit Manager that was a result of my succession planning activities. I added the Order Entry department to my organization with this new role, including one Manger and 13 indirect reports. The group is responsible for entering/importing all orders for the company and ensuring that the process is complete to shipping. I created a stronger control environment ensuring order accuracy and customer satisfaction were the chief goals of the department. I created department metrics and created accountability for the team and leadership. This allowed me to develop talent and create an inside sales component to the Order Entry Department.

The TTI Floor Care Credit Department manages approximately $750MM in annual accounts receivable with 3,500 active accounts consisting of the largest retailers in the US along with an extensive dealer network. The department as a function was broken in 2008 resulting from a difficult acquisition and an understaffed department. I reorganized the department of 15 into three specialized teams and recruited credit professionals to staff the department. The refocused department was dedicated to a cleanup of the accounts receivable for the first nine months. Under my leadership, we improved our % Current from 45% to an average of 88% and reduced our overall deduction balance from $47MM to $12MM. Our improvement is the result of focused work and taking a back to basics approach, collection calls, working deductions, driving speed and accuracy in our transactional processes and measuring performance. I also worked to drive a continuous improvement oriented environment both inside and outside my department. I have led the redesign of our returns process, shortage process, pricing review, the new customer setup process and credit memo coding procedure. I sponsored the implementation of Oracle Advanced Collections, an enhancement to Oracle Accounts Receivable providing a higher level of collection efficiency and tracking. I was also responsible for our AR Securitization reporting and related audits. I worked with our sales team to demonstrate the importance of the working capital risk and cost associated with selling on open credit. I have been on customer visits negotiating $500M+ credit disputes with senior level procurement professionals. In 2010, I was asked to add cash management to my responsibilities. When challenged with this new opportunity I quickly engaged the business and worked to fix a broken process. I recruited a Cash Manager, created and implemented a cash forecasting tool and improved cash forecasting accuracy to within +/-2.5% in a 4 week period.

In this role I assumed responsibility for the Customer Financial Services function for the Graphics and Reflective Divisions. The department manages approximately $350MM in annual accounts receivable with 1,400 active accounts and 4 credit analysts. In August of 2007 we merged the Customer Financial Services function from the Specialty Tape Division into the Graphics and Reflective Customer Financial Services function. As part of this consolidation I managed the consolidation of credit policy and managed employee change concerns while maintaining DSO performance. After the consolidation my annual accounts receivable portfolio totaled approximately $550MM. In March of 2008 I assumed responsibility for the Pricing Administration function, bringing my total direct reports to 5. The pricing function manages approximately 35,000 sku’s along with thousands of special price agreements. While in this role, I participated as an active participant on Avery Dennison’s Credit Management Leadership Team, leading a task force designed to design a proactive approach to partner with our commercial organization to use credit opportunistically. I have also participated in numerous Lean projects and am the Order-to-Cash Process Owner for our Sarbanes-Oxley compliance process. I lead a freight cost recovery project on track to deliver $700M in freight cost recovery.

I was promoted to this role from my previous position. While continuing the responsibilities of my prior role I added several responsibilities. The amount of Accounts Receivable I manage was increased to approximately $75 million due to the addition of another business segment to my area of responsibility. I assumed accounting responsibility of the Net A/R line of the Balance Sheet as part of our divisional accounting processes performing account reconciliations, month end analysis and related journal entries as part of my new responsibility. This has been a development opportunity for me and I have gained an intuitive knowledge of the sub ledger and G/L side of Accounts Receivable. I continued and expanded the responsibility of department leadership. My efforts are focused on developing stronger individuals that can learn to become better decision makers. I am the information systems liaison for the Customer Financial Services department. I work with our team to identify system and process gaps or breaks and work with the appropriate IT resource to address and resolve the issue. I participated in the implementation of Enterprise Lean Sigma and H1 teams while in this role.

This promotion gave me responsibility for a business segment with accounts receivable of approximately $55 million. I was able to effectively increase our percent current to 82%, which was 7% better than plan, from the low 60's. I did this by developing relationships with key personnel at the companies within my business segment. While in this role I participated in the implementation of PeopleSoft. This was a great experience to apply knowledge acquired of information systems. My responsibilities included account mapping, user acceptance testing and post go live support. My ability to understand the system and relate it to business needs resulted in receiving a designation as a "Super User".

This role was a development role for me. The responsibilities of this role included process control, resolving customer claims, gaining technical knowledge of our products, working within a large organization to satisfy the customer's need for information and support, all while supporting the goals of the Customer Financial Services department that I am with currently. While in this role I was certified as a Six Sigma Green Belt. The most notable success of this role was taking an out of control process and establishing controls in order to service the priorities of the company and most importantly satisfy the customer. The result of this success was a reduction in claim resolution from 30+ days to less than ten. I also created a linkage between the claims department and the Customer Financial Services department team due to my understanding of their roles and responsibilities.

In this role I began to develop my aptitude for information systems as they related to Credit and Collections. In addition to my regular duties of Credit and Collection Analyst I participated on the implementation team for GETPaid collections software. This resulted in considerable process improvements with in the collection function. The system implementation resulted in a marked reduction in DSO and an increase in percent current.

I performed the functional role of a credit analyst for a growing plastics manufacturer. The job responsibilities included credit review of new accounts, reviewing orders on credit hold, collections, deduction resolution and special assignments for the department.