TRANSFORMATION LEADERSHIP PHILOSOPHY
Change is hard, and the negative impact that change can have on teams and the staff complement at large can be daunting. Well-meaning and seemingly positive changes have the potential to be extremely disruptive, taxing people’s reserves and tanking productivity. Hedging against the downside of change requires change management which is simultaneously thoughtful, creative, and strategic in its design. When buy-in is earned at all levels of an organization, the potential for betterment is immense. Adaptation to change and resiliency are strategically critical—as change is one of the few constants in life, paradoxically.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Nanoleaf, Toronto, Canada — VP, Commerce Operations
JAN/2021 – MAY/2024
Designed and implemented programs and repeatable processes to support business development, supply chain, and sales operations to the net benefit of end customers in 120 countries. Managed procurement and integration of third party technology solutions alongside in-house development of proprietary solutions. Staff complement : 20 FTE staff across five distinct teams in three global offices.
- Led the solution development and implementation of a hybrid API/EDI technology stack, improving labour productivity significantly in logistics operations ;
- Designed and implemented various business process automation projects which in aggregate improved gross revenue per labour hour significantly in logistics operations ;
- Streamlined integrated inventory management and forecasting processes, ultimately reducing stock-on-hand requirements globally and improving free cashflow.
Professional experience abridged for brevity. Full chronology available at https://www.linkedin.com/in/pwamenear/.
NOTABLE PROJECTS (ABRIDGED)
Scrum for Business Teams — Various Vendors (2018-2019)
Designed and implemented a system of variable-demand work management based on Agile (Scrum), intended to promote passive cross-training at the team level and consolidate work package tracking in a highly visible and transparent toolset. A key outcome of the operational redesign was the ability for work to be self-managed at the team level, without relying on the bottlenecks of mid-level operations managers. Operational managers were redeployed as coaches, with the mandate to support the development of high-performance teams (similar to the role of Scrum Master in agile technical teams).
Headless eCommerce Implementation — Shopify Plus (2019)
Architected and led the implementation of a headless eCommerce stack leveraging Shopify Plus (Enterprise) as the underlying order management system for the global group. The implementation featured a serverless application (static html node) for marketing and commerce UX, custom integrations for global 3PL sites, and a mix of custom and customized off-the-shelf integrations for marketplace selling and programmatic advertising. Revenue increased 12% in the quarter after launch (on a normalized for seasonality basis).
ERP Implementation — Microsoft Dynamics (2021-2022)
Led the implementation of a cloud ERP to the benefit of the global group of companies at Nanoleaf (multi-tenant implementation including product localizations for Canada, France, and Hong Kong). Project involved designing and developing extensions for the ERP in-house, to micro-optimize for unique business process requirements in trading with global subsidiaries.
OM Integration Design — MS Dynamics (2022)
Led the scoping, solution design, and implementation of a bespoke handling layer in Amazon AWS which automates the bidirectional extract-transform-load functions required to transport payloads between an IMS or ERP system and external sales channels. The system was designed to handle connection points over RESTful APIs, SOAP-based APIs, or via flat files (sFTP, primarily).
Business Process Automation — Microsoft 365 / Power Automate (2023)
Led the solution design and implementation of a framework of automated business processes designed to reduce data entry and manual operation of repetitive work across supply chain functions. This work ultimately led to the technology scaffolding supporting an omnichannel sales stack capable of managing orderflow at the millions per month scale.