SEWICKLEY, PA, January 12, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ --Connie Wendzicki has been recognized for showing dedication, leadership and excellence in Supply Chain Management, Operations Performance Improvement, Financial Analysis and Strategic Planning.

Connie has over fifteen years of experience in Supply Chain Management, Operations & Distribution Management, General Management and Finance positions primarily in Fortune 100 companies in the consumer products, paper, packaging, aluminum and mining industries.

Connie started her career as a mechanical engineer working for Westinghouse managing contracts for the manufacture of valves for nuclear reactors. After two years of working for Westinghouse, Connie decided to get her MBA from Carnegie Mellon University. Upon graduation, Connie took a Financial Analyst position with International Paper where she completed the financial / technical analysis of the power plant options for a fully integrated paper mill. Connie then took on the role of facilitating the strategic planning sessions with the Mill's Lead Team. Once the strategic plan was completed and approved, Connie personally executed two of the strategic objectives 1) to improve service levels to meet the specialty paper standards as the Manager over Converting and Distribution and 2) to start-up and rebuild #3 paper machine to convert it from commodity paper grades to specialty paper grades. Not only was Connie able to successfully accomplish these objectives, but she also took #3 paper machine from the 4th quartile in the company to the 1st quartile in the company in eighteen months which was a rare occurrence - especially for a new papermaker. When asked how she accomplished these outstanding results she said "the key was tapping into the crews, the maintenance team, the engineering team and the research team. First we developed key performance indicators and measured the barriers by cause. Then we worked together on cross-functional teams which included the operating crews, maintenance, engineering and research to collectively develop an action plan to reduce or eliminate the top barriers for each performance indicator. It was through their collective support and participation that we made breakthroughs on each indicator which dramatically improved the performance of the machine by more than 30% and qualify 35 new grades of specialty paper as well."

Connie then joined the Liquid Packaging Division where she was also a key contributor to developing and executing key strategic objectives. She developed a capacity model for the eleven packaging plants and crossed it with the forecast she developed with the sales team. Based on the results it was clear that the division needed to consolidate their milk carton production facilities and expand their juice an aseptic plants. Connie then completed a consolidation analysis on the milk carton facilities in the Northeast with the Division Controller and then went on to be the Operations Manager at the largest liquid packaging plant. Within six months, Connie and her team expanded from 200 people to 300 people and added a satellite plant in 15 months.

After this experience, Connie wanted to get experience in sales and marketing and she called Carnegie Mellon's Alumni Office to ask them how this was typically done. They happen to know of a marketing and sales consulting company that was looking for people with operations and supply chain experience. Within a month she had worked out a deal with General Management Technologies to spend 50% of her time on sales and marketing consulting and the remaining 50% on operations and supply chain consulting - the perfect fit. Connie worked with United Stationers leading the development of the Operations Improvement Team, Sterling (a subsidiary of Kohler) to reengineer their New Product Development process, Textron on a Market Strategy process as well as several other supply chain projects.

After working for GMT Connie took a position with DBT America, an underground mining company as the VP Aftersales (repair, rebuild, spare parts, account management and field service which accounted for 70% of the company) where she completed an SAP go-live and then performed the acquisition integration for her departments when DBT acquired a company larger than DBT. Her focus was on improving service to the customer by forming cross-functional teams lead by the Account Managers. The account managers met with the customers to define their needs and the following week an action plan was put together to make sure all departments were executing to meet their needs. During Connie's tenure they experienced the highest revenue and profitability to-date.

Connie then went to work for Alcoa where she spent two years as an Operations Management Consultant working with the plate mill, forging, smelting, refining and casting plants which supplied products for the aluminum, aerospace, automotive, commercial transportation, military and industrial markets. She was them promoted to become President of Baker's Choice Products within Alcoa Consumer Products where she was asked to convert from a private company to a public company and certify to Sarbanes Oxley from scratch within three months. She successfully accomplished this task and was subsequently asked to "fix" the Alcoa Consumer Products Canada (ACP) division. Connie described the situation as "Every piece of the supply chain was broken. Loblaws, our largest customer, gave us four months (until Labor Day) to get service levels to 98% or we would lose their business. She had similar conversations with other customers. Within four months the required inventory levels were established, the warehouse layout was revised accordingly, warehouse procedures were implemented, a new MRP system was in place, sales and operations planning meetings were underway and a new forecasting process was implemented. Additionally root cause analysis / corrective action plans were completed upon on each miss. Within four months ACP Canada reached and maintained 98% on-time delivery with 30% less inventory. ACP also won Loblaws loyalty in the process!"

In September Connie was asked to take on the Sales and Marketing side of ACP, and then asked to take on the sister division, Reynolds Food Packaging Canada, as the General Manager of Canada. The following year Alcoa reorganized to centralize management for North America and Connie became the VP Supply Chain for Reynolds Food Packaging(RFP). In this role she improved the on-time delivery from 65% to 98% in seven months by improving forecasting procedures, implementing an S&OP process, cleaning up data in the system (Oracle), training plant planners, hiring and developing talent, making sure the system was sending the right signals and managing plant, warehouse and vendor performance metrics.

When Alcoa decided to sell Reynolds, Connie was offered a position in the Energy Group in Knoxville, Tn, but decided to join Amazon.com as the Director of Operations to finish starting-up the same day / next day network instead which included finishing hiring the management team for all of the buildings and starting up a facility in Indiana. In the first week in October she was asked to expand her network's capacity by 40% in six weeks. She successfully completed the expansion by adding three lines to existing buildings as well as adding lines to the new facility in Indiana. Connie commented "this is the experience I shared with the people I interviewed so they got a real feel for what life at Amazon.com was like! It is fast-paced and challenging - you really have to love it." The next year Amazon split up the networks and reorganized by region. Connie became the Director of the Midwest Region over jewelry, shoes, and two consumer products (non-conveyable and a same day/next day) warehouses.

Most recently Connie took a position as COO for Griffin Technology, a global consumer electronics assessories company, where she helped sharpen the focus on profitability and service. In 2009 Griffin improved profitability, revenue and service.

Please welcome us in honoring Connie Wendzicki.

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