Vancouver, BC To lend greater support across its far-reaching supply chain — through technology assets, traceability expertise, and marketing focus —The Oppenheimer Group promoted three members of its management team last month.
Warren Bailey has been appointed as the company’s new chief information officer. Bailey joined Oppenheimer in 1995 as a programmer analyst and has played a pivotal role in the organization’s technology leadership ever since. In 2006, he became Oppenheimer’s project and systems architecture manager, and was promoted to director of information technology later that year.
In his new role, Bailey oversees Oppenheimer’s information technology strategy, a critical component of the international marketing and distribution company’s complex global supply chain. Leading a team of 20 technology professionals, Bailey’s focus is on providing information and tools that support all aspects of Oppenheimer’s business with greater speed, detail, and transparency, removing complexity and enabling greater responsiveness.
“We all know how unpredictability is everyday fare in the produce business,” Bailey said. “While we can’t control things like the weather or currency exchange rates, effective use of technology enables us to focus on what we can make an impact on, and place our growers, our customers and ourselves in the best possible position to succeed.”
Recently, Bailey directed the redevelopment and deployment of Oppenheimer’s world class enterprise resource planning system, a task some within the company have likened to rebuilding a 747 while it was in the air.
“Oppenheimer’s system accommodates thousands of transactions and churns out dozens of reports every day,” Bailey said. “While it seemed like business as usual to our users, our team was constructing a whole new platform that now provides a very high level of product detail in real time, enabling the opportunity for enhanced service on all sides of the transaction.”
While optimizing sales performance, Bailey also points to grower-related data as a key benefit of the new system.
“Oppenheimer has long been fully integrated with our grower family from a technology standpoint, but our refined approach supports their information needs even better than before,” he said. “We’ve made it possible for each grower to track product through the entire supply chain and in the market, with real time data available around the clock.”
To further support the company’s grower network, Bailey’s colleague Steve Roosdahl was promoted simultaneously to the role of director, supply chain management. Roosdahl joined the company in 1996 as a senior programmer analyst, moving into the roles of systems development manager and applications development manager a decade later. In 2009, he became the company’s first corporate supply chain manager before assuming his new position in August.
“The supply chain process shares many of the same disciplines as IT,” Roosdahl said. “A technical background has been very useful and has helped me focus quickly on supply chain issues.”
Among other key projects, Roosdahl heads the company’s implementation of the Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI) and consults with members of its grower community to support their efforts as they move through the initiative’s milestones. He is also a highly visible leader on various industry groups dedicated to traceability, PTI, coding and logistics.
Roosdahl is the current co-chair of the industry’s PTI implementation work group and also participates on the PTI master data work group. He plays a leadership role with producesupply.org, serving as a director of this committee which collaborates on industry solutions, and is currently focused on e-commerce and PTI.
In addition, Roosdahl is a member of the Canadian Produce Marketing Association’s industry technology advisory committee, the Produce Marketing Association’s supply chain efficiencies committee, and the GS1 product recall committee.
He said that his involvement in these areas has helped Oppenheimer enhance its own supply chain management efforts and offer expertise to growers, noting specifically that a PTI pilot product has led to very practical insight at both a grower and customer level.
“With one of our grower partners, we’ve joined forces with a major retailer to work through some of the complex realities of PTI,” he explained. “It has given us perspective on everything from order entry, coding, shipping, receiving and traceability from the retailer’s view. This will enable us to navigate our own PTI priorities accordingly.”
While Bailey and Roosdahl have been with Oppenheimer for a decade and a half and experienced the company’s significant growth trajectory, relative newcomer Jason Fung has joined Oppenheimer’s management team with a fresh perspective.
Fung, recently appointed as manager, marketing department, joined Oppenheimer in 2008 as a category analyst for the company’s greenhouse and citrus business. He had recently finished his master’s degree in economics at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, B.C. In February 2010, he became the leader of the company’s business analysis team, which delivers the business intelligence and category analysis that drives Oppenheimer’s marketing strategy. Last month, oversight of creative services and marketing communications were added to Fung’s scope.
Fung’s contributions to date include a refined approach to business intelligence management and reporting, as well as a proven acumen for grower relations. Moving forward, his primary objective is to dedicate Oppenheimer’s marketing team’s energies to the strategic goals of the organization, “delivering real value and driving the business forward.” He views his background in economics as a tool to help achieve this.
“Economics is about resource allocation,” he said. “It’s about optimizing what we have for the greatest benefit. My vision is to bundle our resources to optimize performance and derive greater success for the organization.”
Source: The Oppenheimer Group