Honeywell

By Staff -- Purchasing, 1/13/2000

Title: Manager, Global Projects Supply Management

Company: Honeywell Industrial Automation and Control, headquartered in Phoenix, Ariz., is a worldwide supplier of industrial automation solutions for industries such as refining, petrochemicals, chemicals, oil and gas, pulp and paper, pharmaceuticals and power generation.

Reports to: Sandra Jacobs, director of projects services and support, supply management

Education: BS in operations, production, and purchasing management from Arizona State University; he will receive his MBA from ASU West in May.

Work experience: Walker has spent the past eight years in supply management at Honeywell Industrial Automation and Control. He began with a one-year job rotation program through four different organizations: Sales, estimating, project engineering and contracts. Subsequent positions included commodity manager for computers and computer peripheral products and global agreement manager. In the latter role, he spent a year on assignment at Honeywell's Process Automation Center Europe in Brussels, Belgium. Walker will be at his present position two years in February.

Duties: Under Global Projects Supply Management, Walker is responsible for engineering procurement contracting for domestic and global projects. This includes full supply chain management of purchased services and hardware, as well as engineering construction and installation subcontracts. Purchasing dollars for the department in 1999 stand at $115M, with Walker weighted more on the strategic side of this dollar volume.

Supply management function: "In supply management at Honeywell, there is a heavy emphasis on total cost management solutions, supplier development programs, and supplier value enhancement. The Resident Supplier Program, which has been benchmarked by other companies, is a good example of the value enhancement function, where resident suppliers are a key part of the customer sales proposal process."

Unique to purchasing at Honeywell: "Honeywell recently merged with AlliedSignal, and it will be challenging to integrate the buying functions of these companies. Centralization of some regional supply functions will occur, providing unique opportunities to leverage supply. Supply management will continue to increase its strategic focus and is more integrated today with sales, engineering and marketing. Supply manages a fully integrated supply group in North America across the engineering projects operations groups for product, process, service, subcontract and order fulfillment. This integration encompasses organizations in Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, and Toronto."

Future perspective: "Supply management in particular provides tremendous opportunity for personal growth, creativity and leadership development. Honeywell Industrial Automation and Control will continue to establish KPIs (key performance indicators) that contribute to the operational excellence of the division. Supply management will increase the benchmarking of best practices and will continue to push for increased involvement in obtaining bottom-line results through added supplier value. Supply must also continue to drive transactional costs down through procurement card and Internet buying at the point of use."