Joe Velez

Joe Velez has over 30 years of experience working in large, multi-national manufacturing companies. His background includes all aspects of supply chain management, program management, strategic planning, operations management, business process re-design, ERP implementation management, and Lean Transformation. Joe began his career with ALCOA as an engineer and held numerous positions across sourcing, operations planning, manufacturing, maintenance and strategic planning functions. During Joe’s tenure as the Chief Industrial Engineer for the ALCOA Mill Products business unit, he was intimately involved in design, development and roll-out of the ALCOA Production System which adapted to the tenants of the Toyota Production System to the process industry. As Director of Supply Chain for the ALCOA Aerospace, Commercial Rolled Products business unit, Joe led initiatives to transform a high-mix job shop into a virtual flow shop, reducing inventory by 25% while improving customer service by 30%. In addition, Joe successfully led the re-design and replacement of end-to-end business processes across all ALCOA’s North American rolling mills, completing a total of 11 ERP deployments delivering inventory and cost reductions. After leaving ALCOA, Joe joined Rio Tinto’s ALCAN division where he served as Director of Supply Chain, Procurement, Distribution and third party logistical partners in North, Central and South America. During this time, Joe led implementation of a new corporate Sales & Operations Planning process and led lean transformation initiatives which improved customer service by 27%, reduced procurement costs by $3MM and simplified raw material management driving an inventory reduction of 46%. After, Rio Tinto, Joe served as Vice President of Supply Chain at Oystar, a Packaging Equipment manufacturer, where he leveraged end-to-end supply chain simplification and lean concepts to improve customer service by 30% while growing the business by 30% year over year. Over the last four years, Joe has served as Director of Business Systems Transformation for HNI Corporation, an office furniture manufacturer, which leverages ERP to develop an end-to-end integrated business process framework across all operating companies to drive best in class performance levels. Joe holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico and has done extensive graduate research in the areas of lean manufacturing / transformation, factory physics, theory of constraints and High Performance Leadership. He has served on ALCOA’s Science and Technology advisory council, on the governing board of MIT’s Leaders for Manufacturing program as well as on advisory boards at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, University of Wisconsin Quick Response Manufacturing Center. Joe is a founding member of the Industrial Engineering program at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa. Joe has achieved certifications from Oliver Wight in S&Op, from APICS (CPIM) and is an ALCOA trained Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.