Congrats to Female Leaders in Valizant Community for Women in Supply Chain Honors

It’s my great pleasure to share that today three talented women in our Valizant community were named as Women Supply Chain Leaders by Supply & Demand Chain Executive. Our own Solution Architecture Director Sushma Subramanya was joined on the list by two of our esteemed customers — Hunter Fan’s Jessica Henderson and iRobot’s Christine Donoghue.

I have personally worked alongside these women, and can say that their business acumen and drive for excellence and innovation is extraordinary. Their work and commitment to driving improvements clearly propelled them to this industry honor, which highlights the accomplishments, mentorship and examples set by female supply chain leaders and executives – all who have played important roles in helping their companies and clients address today’s challenges and prepare for and tomorrow’s.

Sushma was an ideal choice for this award. Starting her career as a supply chain business analyst, Sushma quickly became an expert in designing and implementing supply chain solutions across the core industries we serve, including pharmaceutical, agro-business, high tech and manufacturing. She now leads a team of 15 who focus on North American solution architecture. In her 18 months with Valizant, Sushma has been involved in implementing a wide array of solutions – from  demand, supply and promotional planning and statistical analysis; to stocking strategy and product segmentation – all of which help our customers make faster, more accurate decisions; gain visibility into their operations; and save time, money and inventory.

Jessica – who is demand planning manager at Hunter Fan – has redefined the way the company drives its forecasting process. Leading the S&OP process, Jessica implemented Anaplan to enhance analytical capabilities and established strong forecast and order management collaboration, which has turned the demand planning organization into a high performing group. Now she is working on automating systematic processes to help the company’s demand planners better manage the business by exception and further improve forecast accuracy levels.

Christine – iRobot’s senior manager of Global Supply & Production Planning – led the company through two difficult years marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, when the company faced multiple converging challenges associated with unstable and limited supply of microchips, factory shutdowns and logistics interruptions. During this time, she focused on enhancing the Anaplan Global Supply Model, and developing live reporting for visibility and analysis to support quick decision making. Christine also built robust KPIs to track production from order placement through to ex-factory. The trending dashboards and future projected KPIs enable managers to step in and take action to resolve any supply interruptions, increasing the availability of supply to support customer demand. She’s currently looking at developing tools to assist with constraint-based planning, which would give iRobot clearer visibility into the impact of supply constraints on demand plans and then support scenario planning to optimize supply (markets, products, margin and more).

Congratulations to Sushma, Jessica and Christine on this impressive honor and their commitment to transforming the supply chain.