Director of Global Supply Chain

Nextern•Maple Grove, MN

About The Position

The Director, Global Supply Chain provides global functional leadership for Nextern’s end-to-end supply chain organization. The role is responsible for building and leading an integrated global supply chain that supports the company’s growth, manufacturing network, customer commitments, and increasingly complex global operations. Its scope spans strategic sourcing, procurement, supplier management, supply planning, inventory management, materials management, warehousing, logistics, and supply-chain risk. The Director establishes the organizational capabilities, processes, systems, governance, and infrastructure needed to operate as a cohesive global function while maintaining strong connections to Nextern’s manufacturing sites. A key priority is advancing Global Supply Chain as a core element of the Nextern Operating System (NOS), maturing and integrating processes, systems, data, management routines, and capabilities across the global network to improve consistency, transparency, accountability, and scalability. The role calls for a leader who can build organizations and capabilities, develop functional leaders, establish standards and operating mechanisms, and partner across sites and functions. The Director balances global functional leadership with the needs and realities of local manufacturing operations, and provides executive leadership with visibility into supply-chain risks, performance, capability gaps, and improvement priorities. Routine travel of up to 15% is required, with flexibility for higher travel based on business needs.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Supply Chain, Operations, Engineering, Business, or a related discipline.
Significant progressive leadership experience across multiple supply-chain disciplines within a manufacturing environment.
Demonstrated experience leading across multiple sites, regions, or countries in a global supply-chain organization.
Broad experience across strategic sourcing, procurement, supplier management, planning, inventory, materials management, warehousing, and logistics.
Demonstrated success building or maturing supply-chain organizations, processes, systems, and management infrastructure.
Experience implementing common processes, governance, KPIs, and operating mechanisms across decentralized or multi-site operations.
Strong understanding of ERP/MRP-enabled planning environments and the role of systems, master data, analytics, and transactional discipline in supply-chain execution.
Experience leading organizational and process transformation while maintaining day-to-day operational performance.
Strong business and financial acumen, including understanding of inventory, working capital, material cost, supplier economics, and operational performance.
Strong communication, influence, negotiation, and change-leadership capabilities.
Demonstrated ability to develop leaders and build high-performing teams across geographic and organizational boundaries.
Ability to travel routinely up to 15%, with flexibility for periods of higher travel based on business needs.

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree preferred.
Experience within medical device, life sciences, or another highly regulated manufacturing environment preferred.
Experience working within complex outsourced manufacturing, contract manufacturing, or customer-driven manufacturing models preferred.

Responsibilities

Provide functional leadership and direction for the global supply chain organization, including teams supporting the United States, Costa Rica, Vietnam, and China.
Establish and execute a global supply chain strategy aligned with business strategy, growth plans, manufacturing footprint, and customer requirements.
Build a cohesive global function with clear accountability, decision rights, standards, priorities, and performance expectations; develop the organizational structure and capabilities needed for growth.
Set global priorities while allowing appropriate flexibility for local site execution and customer requirements, and build strong relationships with manufacturing sites and enterprise functions.
Lead global strategic sourcing, procurement, supplier management, and supplier development.
Establish category and sourcing strategies that balance cost, quality, delivery, capacity, supply continuity, and long-term business needs.
Strengthen supplier selection, qualification, negotiation, contracting, performance management, and relationship management; coordinate negotiations and leverage global purchasing scale where appropriate.
Establish consistent supplier performance measures, governance, and escalation mechanisms, and partner with Quality and Operations to address systemic supplier issues and improve supplier capabilities.
Identify and manage supply continuity risks, capacity constraints, geographic risks, sole-source dependencies, and other supply-base vulnerabilities.
Provide executive functional ownership for demand planning, supply planning, SIOP, production and material planning, MRP, and inventory management.
Partner with the Principal, Global Supply Planning & Inventory Strategy to develop and deploy common planning methodologies, inventory strategies, planning analytics, and MRP governance.
Establish planning processes, operating rhythms, accountability, and metrics that improve visibility and enable timely, fact-based decisions.
Balance customer service, manufacturing requirements, supply continuity, working capital, and inventory risk; strengthen governance of excess and obsolete inventory, safety stock, and inventory health.
Ensure planning processes connect commercial, customer program, operations, finance, and supply-chain teams.
Establish global standards for materials management, warehousing, logistics, and inventory control; strengthen material flow from suppliers through manufacturing and to customers.
Develop consistent approaches to warehouse management, material handling, inventory accuracy, transaction discipline, transportation, and logistics performance.
Partner with site and operations leaders to improve material availability while reducing unnecessary inventory, handling, expediting, and operational complexity.
Identify opportunities to improve the global logistics network, service performance, cost, and supply-chain resilience.
Lead the continued development and deployment of the Nextern Operating System (NOS) across Global Supply Chain and build an integrated, scalable supply-chain operating model.
Establish common global processes, standards, governance, KPIs, and management routines across supply-chain disciplines; assess and strengthen supporting systems, tools, data, and infrastructure.
Integrate processes across sites and functions, defining global standards, ownership, decision rights, interfaces, and appropriate local flexibility; reduce fragmentation where common processes improve performance and scalability.
Improve process discipline, data integrity, visibility, accountability, and repeatability; embed structured problem solving, continuous improvement, standard work, performance management, and fact-based decision making.
Partner with Operations, Quality, Finance, Commercial, IT, and other functions to strengthen end-to-end processes and build sustainable capabilities.
Own global supply-chain functional standards, talent, organizational capability, processes, priorities, governance, and performance; maintain clear accountability between global leadership and local execution.
Partner with site leaders, support resolution of significant supply-chain challenges, and foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across the global network.
Build, develop, and retain a strong global supply-chain leadership team; set expectations and accountability while empowering regional and site leaders.
Develop functional talent and succession pipelines, competencies, career paths, and development opportunities; coach leaders for a matrixed global manufacturing environment.
Create a culture of accountability, collaboration, transparency, disciplined execution, continuous improvement, and proactive problem solving.
Establish meaningful global KPIs and management routines; use data and analytics to identify systemic issues, root causes, resource priorities, and sustainable improvements.
Partner with Finance on visibility into inventory, purchase commitments, material cost, working capital, and supply-chain financial performance.
Partner with Commercial and customer-facing teams to incorporate supply-chain capabilities and constraints into customer commitments and business decisions.
Provide the COO and executive leadership team with visibility into significant supply-chain risks, performance trends, capability gaps, and improvement priorities.