Sherri Kovach

Purchasing Buyer, using expertise in the procurement of service parts for the Ford supply chain, promoting compliance with purchasing guidelines and policies, exchanging best practices and experience amongst other buyers and other departments, and developing professional purchasing relationships with my vendors. Some of my duties and accomplishments as a Purchasing Buyer included:

• Computed and created purchase orders in the SAP system to monitor stock levels, verify purchase requisitions, and expedite customer orders to procure service parts for Ford HDS.
• Actively coordinated with suppliers and Accounting to resolve issues on purchase orders, quotes, and invoices relating to Ford HDS service parts transactions.
• Performed Root Cause Analysis for invoices with compliance issues that required manual tracking/processing.
• Resolution of issues through purchase order correction, pricing correction, or referring to supplier for correction.
• Created a 30% improvement in the confirmation of deliveries by my suppliers.
• Improved clearance of open unresolved invoices for my suppliers left by previous buyers by 85%
• Achieved 100% clearance rate regarding invoices and transactions
• Collaborated with customer service to ensure that part buys of service parts for third-party suppliers were executed, tracked, and delivered within acceptable timeframes for their supply chain needs.
• Conducted Negotiation with suppliers with integrity for spot buys due to unexpected needs that our customer (Ford) required of us (VORs, Recall and Pull ahead, etc.)
• Quoted resourcing parts that suppliers had discontinued or no longer supported throughout the supply chain.
• Developed and improved account relationships. Evaluated suppliers in the supply chain as to policy compliance and manufacturing capability/performance.
• Coordinated last-time buys/all-time buys (LTB/ATB) for parts that suppliers were phasing out and discontinuing due to tooling age and low production demand.
• Beyond my normal duties, provided training, mentoring, and guidance to junior team members on best practices in purchasing, fostering a culture of continuous improvement within the procurement department. Coaching them to act with integrity, cooperation, and ethics through personal inspiration and motivating them to become full buyers.
• Participated as a cross-functional team member with Management, Customer Service, HDS Buyers, Quality, and Quoting to improve supply-chain policies and timing, which resulted in the resolution of issues.
• Coordinated with logistics teams to resolve any shipping delays or discrepancies while minimizing impact on operations.
• Participated as HR Huddle Team member, enhanced the organization's information through communication of leadership vision and policies to teammates, including suggestions for motivational activities and helping provide inspiration and motivation.

Provided support to Nissan Business Unit (BU) Vice-President, other BU senior leaders, and the entire 75-member team (Program Managers, Finance team, Engineers, and Quality team members. Executed daily administrative duties, including calendar management, meeting scheduling, reception, special event/meeting planning, expense report preparation, travel arrangements, internal communication, and maintaining document security. My accomplishments were:

• Delivered top-notch administrative support to junior managers, engineers and office staff, promoting excellence in office operations, travel plans and professional needs in an ethical manner.
• Contributed to a positive work environment by fostering strong working relationships with colleagues across departments.
• Maintained purchase requisitions into SRM/SAP (previously) Oracle for prototype parts and equipment purchases, equipment maintenance, and necessary BU certifications using Request for Quotes (RFQs) and Bill of Materials (BOMs) received from customers and suppliers for the entire BU to support prototype builds for PO issuance
• Developed, then managed, a policy that updated the PO tracker for tracking prototype transactions for the BU from requisition to PO to invoice processing to ensure timely communication, follow-up, feedback and resolution.
• Resolved customers issues on requisitions, quotes and invoices relating to BU prototype transactions
• Approved invoices in Ariba.
• Supplier Administrator for the Nissan OEM Supplier Portal for Adient NA, plc used to connect the teams to Nissan to execute pricing updates, engineering change orders and prototype requests
• Collected individual monthly summary reports from supervisors, eliminating redundancies, into clear highly concise executive summary of the department, for management review.
• Assisted in the creation of compelling presentations for executive-level meetings using PowerPoint skills.

Job eliminated and moved to Administrative Assistant