OPERATIONS LEADERSHIP PHILOSOPHY
Operational excellence is the backbone of every resilient organization. It’s very easy to skip over the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ which underpins the activities taken on by teams to carry out their duties. An activity map and its corresponding process sets should never be so rigid as to be impervious to common sense, nor so malleable that productivity suffers unnecessarily. Operational excellence requires strong servant-leaders who aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves alongside teams when things get messy. Good operations teams move as one, and are a translucent support system for the rest of the organization—barely noticeable when things are functioning as they should.
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 and improving free cashflow.
Professional experience abridged for brevity. Full chronology available at https://www.linkedin.com/in/pwamenear/.
NOTABLE PROJECTS
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).
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.