Your Opportunity as the Director, Customer Supply Chain Initiatives - U.S. Retail

Location: Orrville, Corporate Offices

Work Arrangements: Hybrid, 30% in office expectations

In this role you will:

Staff Development and Leadership

Provide both strategic and tactical leadership through managers and provides direction for the overall management of our Customer Logistics Teams. Empowers a continuous improvement mindset and analysis that can drive key decisions at all levels of our organization.  Continually focus on the future organizational design and customer account structure needed to support our company’s growth targets and the needs of the individual SBA’s. 

Develop the skills and knowledge of the team to ensure service excellence is delivered to both our internal and external customers while also enabling harmonized processes and recommendations across our customer accounts as needed and appropriate. 

Recommend and execute personnel actions, such as hiring, performance evaluations, promotions, organizational design, succession planning, and salary administration

Develop budget recommendations and make operation decisions to execute against this financial plan.  Implement financial decisions as needed to support corporate direction.  Enable a synergy pipeline for top line growth across our customer accounts and bottom-line synergy savings across our supply chain and cost to serve model.

Develop future supply chain leaders through career path planning and execution and cross functional purposeful assignments as appropriate. 

Empowers team members to work together and make decisions internally, cross functionally across our supply chain and commercial teams and externally with our customers, providing guidance and support as required.

Foster an environment that reflects Company culture and encourages new ideas/innovation.  Serve as a role model for our departmental climate and corporate culture.

Develop and Execute Both Strategic and Tactical Decisions

Lead and develop plans to execute day to day order fulfillment and customer inventory analysis with a focus on service excellence and data analysis.  

Identify and promote strategic opportunities by assimilating vast and often disparate information in a timely manner to make recommendations to the Supply Chain, SBA and Sales Leadership Teams to take action. 

Support the activities of the Customer Logistics Team and is accountable to achieve Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) across all teams while delivering a high level of service at optimum cost to customers. 

Serve as a key liaison between both internal and external constituents. 

Drive key supply chain activities in acquisition integrations and special projects and other strategic initiatives, with a focus on timely completion of key milestones. 

Build and leverage internal partnerships to deliver short and long-term business goals. 

Propose and implement improvement opportunities (IO’s) intended to advance standard operating procedures, performance, and overall efficiencies.

Promote and reinforce our Customer Logistics Strategic Plans and Tactics.

Actively drive customer logistics strategic opportunities on key SBA projects and bring end to end supply chain expertise across our JMS and customer supply chain networks to these initiatives.  Promote these opportunities with Sales and the SBA leadership teams. 

Understand the complexities of our key customers’ and distributor supply chains and how best to address their unique challenges. 

Results of actions or behavior with customers could have serious repercussions for a portion of a single SBA or function

Drive Customer Supply Chain Excellence

Provide strategic direction and input on Supply Chain Programs.  This may include, but is not limited to, customizing programs to meet unique customer requirements, staying abreast of industry initiatives and trends, and identifying opportunities that benefit the customer while supporting corporate growth objectives.  

Meet directly with customers as needed to share cost/benefit analysis for programs such as plant direct shipments, transportation opportunities, unloading efficiency, EDI business processes, return management, data synchronization, replenishment and inventory mgmt., etc.

Foster and maintain strong collaborative relationships with peers across our supply chain teams, commercial teams, customer accounts and third-party support structure (i.e. broker relationships, etc.)

Enables self and team to actively participate in industry benchmarking providing key industry insights for supply chain excellence

Point of contact for cross functional initiatives across key customer accounts with a focus on supply chain cost efficiencies.

Sponsor key transformation workstreams such as customer profitability.

Can support key strategic joint business planning discussions, negotiations and strategy discussions.

Develops vision for key metric and exception reporting for end-to-end supply chain view across our JMS and retailer supply chain network.

Enables strategic account ownership and prioritization along with internal benchmarking and re application.

Ensures strategic CCB and Sales partnership for go to market and revenue recognition.

The Right Role for You

We are bold, kind, strive to do the right thing, we play to win, and we believe in a strong community that thrives together. Our culture is rooted in our Basic Beliefs, and we believe in supporting every employee by meeting their physical, emotional, and financial needs.

What we are looking for:

Minimum Requirements:

Bachelor’s Degree

8+ years of supply chain experience (CPG industry preferred)

People management experience

Strong written and verbal communication skills

Adept at problem solving, especially in a group setting

Results driven and self-motivated

Emotionally intelligent

Ability to prioritize and work efficiently in a high demand, fast-paced environment

Proficient at building relationships and trust with coworkers and customers

Professional maturity to interact with senior leadership

Knowledgeable in supply chain processes such as order management, deduction management, EDI and VMI

Ability to think strategically and motivate others toward this vision

Ability to travel 10% of schedule.

Learn more about working at Smucker:

Our Total Rewards Benefits Program

Our Thriving Together Philosophy Supporting All Impacted by Our Business 

Our Continued Progress on Inclusion, Diversity and Equity 

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