Director Materials Management

Briggs & Stratton • Milwaukee, WI

4d • Onsite

About The Position

As a Director Materials Management, your goal is to be accountable for the supply and movement of all materials from their source to the point of use at the factory, actively planning and executing to achieve productivity and efficiency targets as well as managing risk and generating cost savings to achieve the strategic goals of the business. The Director of Material Management will lead the Materials Management Group and direct the global optimization of all processes and systems within Material Handling, Purchasing, Production Control, and Detailed Scheduling. This includes facilitating effective design and decision making related to system and process improvements with key stakeholder functions in Production, Planning, Sourcing, IT, and Finance. This position reports to the Sr. Director of Planning & Materials Management with a dotted line to Plant Managers to ensure holistic alignment of activities. This position leads all material management activities as well as process and system development across 5 production plants (4 US, 1 China) within the Power, Electrification and Energy Solutions Business Units. This position is also expected to closely align best practice with all business units across Briggs & Stratton.

Requirements

• Minimum of 15 years experience in materials management, production, and inventory control or supply chain management.
• Bachelor's Degree in Business, Engineering or Related field.
• Must possess strong business and financial skills including the ability to utilize financial metrics and knowledge of business cost structure to support making decisions.
• Demonstrated high technical expertise in SAP ECC and SAP S4 HANA is required.
• Strong written and oral communication skills required as well as the ability to communicate at ALL levels of the organization and use influence skills effectively in a cross functional environment.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across functions to resolve issues.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s Degree preferred.
• BW/BI, EDI, Logility, and DOMO experience preferred.
• Demonstrated use of AI tools in Materials Management or Supply Chain activities such as Gemini, NotebookLM, Claude, n8n, or Motion is highly preferred.
• Prior experience with Continuous Improvement methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma is preferred.
• Demonstrated experience identifying improvement opportunities and leading teams to complete projects.

Responsibilities

• Lead and coach materials management teams and create a culture focused on continuous improvement.
• Develop a vision and long-term strategy related to the system, process, and skill roadmap to institutionalize best practices in all aspects of materials management.
• Act as global process owner in IT forums to ensure ‘Plan to Produce’ (PTP) changes are aligned and fit for purpose across functions and across business units and development needs are translated to IT.
• Establish and utilize a broad range of KPIs to measure overall people, system and process performances. Communicates improvement opportunities and actions to Business Unit Leadership Teams. Directly accountable for improvement of component inventory turns, supplier delivery and minimizing production shortages.
• Ability to effectively influence and drive alignment between cross functional groups (Finance, Planning, Manufacturing, Sourcing, et. al.) in pursuit of the best possible business results for the company and our customers.
• Where relevant and in conjunction with system and process improvements, this role will ensure effective training to ensure impacted areas can effectively execute any new functionality or process.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director