Nathan Richard Email & Phone Number

Bloomingdale, Illinois, Us

Bloomingdale, Illinois, Us

• Led a team of 60-80 Production associates to achieve key metrics in safety, quality, efficiency while promoting NOW’s culture, employee engagement, and servant leadership. Hired, trained, certified, and mentored dozens of new employees during a rapid ramp-up to increase output to meet customer demand.• Managed all areas within both Processing and Packaging during rotating intervals, sharing best practices and encouraging communication between formerly siloed departments.• Overhauled the work flow for Preweigh work centers. Implemented kanbans for frequent ingredients, re-designed pallet flows and staging locations, created 6S best practices within the room, encouraged a strong team-first attitude, improved, expanded, and launched Formweigh software at 395, and created labor management tools to provide previously-unknown visibility into employee performance and expected batch completion times.

Bloomingdale, Illinois, Us

• Created capacity measurements, metrics, and analyses to plan for rapid growth. Upgraded and led monthly Supply & Operations (S&OP) meetings with senior leadership to act on these capacity signals.• Integral team member for the design, testing, and implementation of Oracle’s Cloud MRP platform (Supply Planning module), replacing the existing on premise solution with no downtime during the transition.• Promoted best-in-class data management within NOW’s corporate ERP via data auditing and resolution, automated data validation, and training and increased organizational visibility and accountability.• Coordinated and facilitated a cross-functional leadership all-day kaizen event to reduce lead times and increase throughput for supplier qualifications.

Cambridge, Ontario, Ca

• Managed 100% of direct and indirect spend (20M annually). Directly responsible for commercial negotiation, cost savings, supply planning with seasonal and capacity considerations, and demand planning.• Designed and led monthly Integrated Business Planning (IBP) Supply Reviews as the Supply Facilitator, partnering with Oliver Wight and executive sponsorship to create an integrated, multi-site IBP process.

Cambridge, Ontario, Ca

• Commodity manager for domestic and international direct materials. Ensured optimal supply levels and cost reductions while improving supplier relationships in a lean manufacturing environment.• Developed and implemented tariff mitigation strategy such as negotiation, reducing dutiable value via incoterms and vertical integration, and import/export tools such as drawbacks, FTZs, and country of origin.

• Increased the Inbound department’s cartons per hour rate by 26% YoY via decreased turnover, process improvement, and associate engagement and coaching.

Milwaukee, Wi, Us

•Evaluated and implemented an inventory localization strategy with a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) cost model for a Taiwanese supplier, resulting in inventory savings of $1.3M.•Identified $1.35M of savings (25.4% of spend) through a Should Cost analysis of a supplier (ODM) design.•As a buyer managing suppliers totaling $15M in annual spend, ensured on-time delivery and led root-cause analysis to improve standard metrics.

Bloomingdale, Illinois, Us

• Developed the Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) for every SKU, identifying $4.3M annual savings.• Created and implemented an optimized Safety Stock model to strategically assign inventory, leading to $1.9M in inventory savings (16% lower Safety Stock value) while maintaining 96% service levels.• Analyzed multiple components of NOW’s supply chain and inventory management system, including utilizing value stream mapping for their largest co-manufacturer to reduce lead times.• Worked with key stakeholders to launch a Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process in order to collaboratively improve customer service levels, which improved customer fill rate from 94% to 96%.

Bloomingdale, Illinois, Us

• Managed and led a new data collection system to communicate and measure Key Performance Indicators. Trained and supported 325 manufacturing employees to accurately record production data.• Launched Six Sigma and Lean concepts alongside the creation of the NOW Performance System. • Empowered employees to look for continuous improvement solutions in quality, safety, and efficiency, and created and maintained a database containing operator-generated Action Items.

Bloomingdale, Illinois, Us

• Proactively sought areas of improvement for the maintenance and redesign of NOW’s eight websites.• Led a cross-departmental effort to organize and streamline the process of updating images and web pages for over 1400 SKUs with ongoing label revisions.• Website maintenance and redesign through Oracle Site Studio Contributor, using HTML and CSS. Proactive in seeking areas of improvement and development.

Bloomingdale, Illinois, Us

As a General Utility Assistant, worked in many different areas in the organization. Specialized in interdepartmental communication.• Assisted and fully learned the production process of a large vitamin and supplement wholesaler and distributer• Experience in operations, production, processing, label management, packaging, order fulfillment, picking, packing, returns, and quality assurance.Worked and managed coworkers in a corporate office setting• Researched thousands of clinical abstracts to help determine the efficacy of nutritional supplements in regards to human health under Elwood Richard, founder of NOW Foods.• Developed an organizational system to hold research articles using Microsoft Access and Oracle, and delegated the continuation of research to other coworkers• Consolidated, updated, and accurately documented the contact information for thousands of health food store owners, as well as for over 10,000 customers.• Demonstrated knowledge and persuasion skills while answering inbound sales calls in order to process customer orders, in addition to a variety of sales inquiries.

Master Of Business Administration (M.B.A.), Operations And Supply Chain

Bachelor Of Arts (B.A.), Business/Economics And Music