Steve Edwards

Steve Edwards Steve is a hands-on manager with over 20 years of experience in supply chain and operations management. He is currently the Managing Director of the Supply Chain Resource Consortium (SCRC) at North Carolina State University, and a member of the Business Management Faculty. He has a Master of Science in Management from North Carolina State University (nominated to Phi Kappa Phi) with a concentration in Operations Management and Bachelors Degrees from the State University of New York at Albany. During his career, he has had the opportunity to lead groups of people in different situations and settings. He has experience with direct line management, leadership of technical teams, leading initiatives that involved co-workers and organizations that reported elsewhere, and leading groups of suppliers and customers. He has directly managed manufacturing and warehouse personnel. He has improved maintenance practices and energy usage of multi-plant maintenance organizations, supervised the specification development, selection and installation of computerized maintenance management systems in an organization with over $140mm of equipment. He has created and led teams of engineers and manufacturing personnel through the entire development and installation of new process areas to manufacture new generations of products. Steve also led an ISO 9000 certification effort within a 2500 person organization. Steve has a lot of interest and experience in the area of process improvement. His approach to process improvements has included stepping back to understand fundamental goals of the effort so that the bigger organization’s, or business’, objectives are met. Applying this set of process analysis skills to many different industries, business processes and problem solving have been a hallmark of his career. He has analyzed existing warehouse stocking layouts and material handling strategies of a $17mm finished goods warehouse. He also provided customer consulting on material handling issues for key customers, assessed problem areas through warehouse visits and provided detailed recommendations for improvement. He was instrumental in cutting the time of bringing process workstations online from eight weeks to three days. He has increased flexibility to meet downstream customer needs by redesigning and consolidating logistics systems outputs that involved shrinking inflexible 'frozen' order time from 12 weeks to 10 days. He has improved customer service by vertically integrating process areas and warehousing operations, changed job designs to improve quality, consolidate process space requirements through process analysis as well as developing process flows for new operations, existing operations and green-field manufacturing locations. Organizing data into critical, useable information is something that Steve has done regularly. He has considerable experience in developing formal budgets, business cases, and organized information trails for audits and historical data. He has managed $12mm+ annual power purchasing programs and budgeting for four manufacturing facilities, developed and managed maintenance, spare parts and utility budgets and improved budgeting processes in many different settings. He has developed labor, space and pro forma cost estimates for 150- person, 100,000 square foot manufacturing operations and material handling programs while being responsible for strategic and tactical manufacturing planning, operational layouts and business process analysis for manufacturing functions. Steve has also supervised the development of new job designs and standard hours and production lead times for many current and future product processes. Steve has gained considerable experience and proficiency in managing projects during his career. Through solid planning, thorough monitoring and relationship building, he has consistently brought projects in on time and under budget. He has managed projects that have involved construction, relocation, new process development, information system issues and many other technical business process issues. He has directly supervised the construction of multiple process areas in an 8000 person manufacturing organization over several years: process areas included material handling equipment, tooling, workstations and storage, all process areas online, on time and within budget to support production requirements. He has planned and executed the relocation of a 7000 SKU stocking facility between company plant locations while maintaining production, and again moved the operation between company divisions at a later date. Steve managed the installation and customization of a $2.5mm automated material handling system without impacting current operations, he has worked with suppliers to specify, select, design and install complex equipment installations with tight deadlines: installations included packaging lines, air compressor installations with 3900 horsepower, evaporative cooling systems and water treatment systems. Steve has managed close to 100 student/faculty/company projects dealing with operations and supply chain management issues in SCRC member companies while at NC State University. He has worked on supply chain improvement projects with John Deere, GKN Automotive, Milliken and Company, Sonoco Products, Duke Energy, Progress Energy, Solectron, Bayer Biological Products, Nortel Networks, Indus International, BridgePoint, BorgWarner, ABB, American Airlines, Bechtel, General Motors, Frontier Spinning Mills, and Sara Lee. Steve has held the positions of Managing Director, Operation Analysis Manager, Strategic Business/Operations Planner, Methods Improvement Manager, Production Manager, and Materials Management Analyst, Consultant, Partner and Lecturer while with IBM Corporation, Frontier Spinning Mills, LLC, North Carolina State University and in his own consulting business. He has four Million Dollar savings awards and two Plant-Wide Quality awards from the IBM Corporation, and was inducted to the Academy of Outstanding Faculty Engaged in Extension, N.C. State University, 2002. Steve has published with Cecil Bozarth in the areas of market requirements focus and performance as well as in the area of cost systems.