Neil Macdonald Email & Phone Number

Croatia

- Oversaw Project Management Office (PMO), Business Systems/Processes, Data Analysis, Engineering Strategy, and CAD/PLM Best Practices. - Grew PMO from inception to 40+ global teams, overseeing 25% of New Product Development projects and increasing on-time delivery by 30%. - Minimized issues by holding team members accountable for timelines/communication with all other departments and ensured all team members were PMI certified or in-process. - Streamlined and integrated new product development stage gate processes between acquired organizations to facilitate New Product Development timelines across all categories while maintaining ISO 9001:2015 compliance. - Forecasted and supervised a $120M engineering budget for technology evaluation and New Product Development. - Communicated all process changes and coordinated large, all-hands meetings. - Created Power BI dashboards to monitor all key engineering performance indicators, allowing for detailed analysis at the team level. - Utilized data to make informed analyses on engineering needs to track, evaluate, and improve KPIs.- Identified and coordinated a 53% reduction of SKUs with the Marketing and Sales teams, incorporating clear exit strategies based on logical substitution replacements to maintain market share. - Migrated and consolidated PLM systems for engineering documentation, including drawings, engineering requests, Bills of Materials (BOMs), test records, marketing, and associated compliance information.

Remote - Southington, Connecticut & Split Croatia

- Led Transformations in Training and Mentoring, Business Analysis, Business Systems & Processes, Engineering Finances. - Directed global team of 10 people supporting larger engineering organization (800+) with CAD /PLM Strategies, training, project analytics, and facilities projects. Reported to Global VP of Engineering with a team of 22 supporting ~2K people. - Automated systems and processes to reduce bottlenecks and non-value-added project time up to 60%, improving delay visibility by proving new automated process would handle corner cases better than manual process, changing pro status quo mentality. Improved training/communication by establishing KPIs to drive accountability and integrity. - Orchestrated the design and establishment of $7M engineering and testing center, Reduced building footprints by merging design center with manufacturing center, leading to expansion from 15 staff members to 80+ in office weekly, aiding return to office & hybrid working environment post-COVID, and increasing connectivity with Engineering, Testing, & Operations. - Led $80M budget with new financial controls, increasing speed/compliance while reducing costs. Reduced every project by 2 weeks by standardizing purchase ordering & preventing vendor issues. - Removed 6 weeks by allying with controllership to simplify DOA, enabling one-time purchases and ensuring for similar pricing across projects, in one case saving ~$150K. - Established a comprehensive instructional designed training and development program for engineering and supporting teams with plans for keeping relevant

Southington, Connecticut, United States

- Oversaw Reliability Engineering, Compliance, and Testing Laboratory. with a global team of 90+ Established new teams to accelerate new product development while studying VOC to validate quality/on-time delivery. Focused on high-value projects to develop processes and establish Proof-of-Concept. - Verified new and existing products met all global regulations while ensuring safety and internal reliability standards were up to date and led root cause analysis to correct repetitive failure mechanisms. - Implemented system tracking and maintained workflow processes and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), including resource workload, timeline, and vendor assessments, resulting in improved productivity of 24%.

Southington Ct

- Supervised Hand Tools DTV and Complexity. Drove delivery of high-quality, scalable, and market solution products.- Guided 10 global staff members to drive change management, productivity, and Design for Excellence (DFx) / Design to Value (DTV) for $6M in annual margin benefit. - Designed Value Strategies by studying consumer wants/needs and removing unneeded features, materials, process steps, and costly printing methods while maintaining quality and meeting customer demands. - Executed complexity reduction program, reducing SKUs by 18% globally and delivering $9M in related savings. - Planned and coordinated Kaizen events to optimize cost and drive value to end users from idea to completion, delivering $13M in annual savings.

Southington, Ct

- Spearheaded margin optimization in new product introductions through platform planning and complexity reduction steps. - Led $2M margin optimization projects through design, lean six sigma manufacturing, and sourcing initiatives. - Identified and recommended SKUs for reduction utilizing sales, forecasts and functional equivalence for up to 75% reduction in key categories.

- Led cross-functional teams to implement continuous quality improvement initiatives for a wide variety of customers. - Allied with customers to determine critical part features and review manufacturability of design and quality challenges utilizing advanced product quality planning (APQP) and Production Part Approval Process (PPAP) - Enhanced and audited Quality Management System (QMS) ensuring site adherence of Nadcap and AS9100. - Led lean manufacturing projects and applied metrology technologies to processes, reducing costs and times.

Milford Ct

Held two simultaneous roles As Product Development Engineer and as a Project Manager.As Product Development Engineer: - Generated innovative product concepts and injection molding processes for cost efficiencies/durability. Drove R&D for projects to reduce assembly part counts, saving assembly and yielding multiple patents on new products. - Studied consumer trends to form innovative and patented products superior to competition at reduced cost. - Designed and implemented highly technical measurement systems in major production streams within some of the largest manufacturing facilities in the organization.As Project Manager: - Led global technical development teams on research, quality engineering, mold tooling, and automation to develop technical strategies and resources for project needs of multiple global product lines by utilizing stage gate process. - Allied with marketing to identify consumer trends / preferences and used market knowledge to new product development. - Managed personnel, resources, meetings, sub-projects, consumer studies, and timelines to achieve technical goals on time and on budget. Handled multiple concurrent prototype molding tool builds (up to $50K) with external vendors

Milford Ct

- Built global quality goals and metrics based on consumer expectations using Six Sigma methodologies such as FMEA, Pareto Charts, Fishbone Diagrams, Design of Experiments, & Boundary Diagrams, solving design & manufacturing issues.

Milford Ct

- Conducted research of new and existing products for all aspects of design / manufacturing process for engineering release. Designed and led consumer-based studies to drive development of new products and understanding of technologies.

Master Of Business Administration (Mba)

Master Of Science (Ms), Mechanical Engineering

Bachelors, Mechanical Engineering

Activities and Societies: ASME