From Oracle Program Manager to Global IT Leader: A Career Built on Transformation and Execution
Early in my career, I joined ArvinMeritor, a global automotive components manufacturer, as a Program Manager leading the launch of a worldwide Oracle ERP implementation. That experience set the stage for a career defined by large-scale transformation, strategic leadership, and operational excellence.
After a successful global rollout, I was promoted to IT Director, where I would soon face one of the most defining challenges of my early executive career, a $3 billion divisional spin-off that required building a new IT organization and infrastructure from the ground up.
Leading IT Through a $3 Billion Divestiture
When ArvinMeritor decided to sell its Exhaust Systems Division, I was chosen by the CIO to lead the IT separation effort. This was not simply a technical project—it was the creation of a fully independent enterprise.
I handpicked a small, elite team from within the IT department, assessing which systems would remain with ArvinMeritor, and which needed to be duplicated or replaced. We developed a comprehensive budget, transition roadmap, and implementation plan to enable the new company—EMCON Technologies—to operate autonomously on Day One.
At launch, EMCON had approximately 16–17 global sites, 10,000–20,000 employees, and two data centers: one in Augsburg, Germany, and another in Indianapolis, Indiana.
- Europe: SAP for ERP, supported by our SAP development team in Germany.
- U.S.: QAD MFG/PRO ERP.
- Data Replication: Implemented a then-cutting-edge technology from Data Domain to synchronize data between data centers, achieving reliable, near real-time replication.
This dual-system, dual-region design provided operational resilience and performance optimization—principles that would continue to shape my later global strategies.
Acquisition by Faurecia and the Move to Global IT Leadership
After two years, EMCON Technologies was acquired by Faurecia, a $28 billion French automotive giant with over 200,000 employees and 300 sites worldwide. I transitioned to Faurecia as Global Director of Technology, Infrastructure, and Operations and acting CTO.
The organization’s IT landscape was large, complex, and fragmented—with 13 data centers and numerous troubled projects that had consumed significant budgets without results.
Fixing Failing Global Projects
When I arrived, two of the most visible failures were:
- Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM) – A five-year, million-dollar project that still wasn’t operational.
- Laptop Encryption – Another multi-year effort that ended in disaster when a failed authentication server triggered automatic deletion of all encrypted data—including data from executive laptops.
Within six months, we stabilized and completed the IAM rollout.
For laptop encryption, I replaced the failed French-developed solution with Symantec Endpoint Encryption, a proven enterprise platform that provided robust protection without the catastrophic “call home” flaw that had erased corporate laptops in the past.
Global Data Center Consolidation
One of my next strategic initiatives was to reduce Faurecia’s 13 global data centers to just two—one in Marcousis, France and one in Detroit, USA.
The French site, operated by IBM, was exceptionally secure—it hosted systems used by the French government’s nuclear agency. The consolidation process involved:
- Migrating and virtualizing hundreds of enterprise servers.
- Implementing redundant fiber links and enterprise storage replication.
- Ensuring minimal decibel (dB) signal loss across fiber interconnects—a process that required specialized expertise and months of precision work.
Once completed, the two remaining data centers provided a secure, high-availability backbone for Faurecia’s worldwide operations.
Solving the Single-Instance SAP Problem
Faurecia’s SAP landscape was another major bottleneck. With 100,000+ users and 300 sites worldwide operating on a single global instance, downtime for patching or maintenance was virtually impossible. Any unplanned outage halted production across all continents—an untenable risk for a manufacturing organization of that size.
To address this, I architected and provided the concept of a dual-instance SAP strategy:
- SAP East: Supported Europe and Africa.
- SAP West: Supported the Americas and Asia.
This division improved performance, reduced latency, and finally enabled scheduled maintenance windows without halting global operations. Each data center could serve as a disaster recovery (DR) mirror for the other, with cross-ocean replication ensuring continuity.
The solution also resolved long-standing latency problems for barcode scanning systems in China, improving production efficiency and system reliability.
The Results: Stability, Scalability, and Resilience
Under my leadership, Faurecia achieved:
- 13 data centers reduced to 2, cutting operational costs dramatically.
- Global SAP split and mirrored across continents, improving uptime and flexibility.
- Full IAM and encryption rollouts, restoring executive confidence in IT.
- Disaster recovery replication across the Atlantic, creating near-zero downtime resilience.
These initiatives transformed Faurecia’s IT organization from reactive to strategic—turning technology infrastructure into a foundation for global performance and growth.
Closing Thoughts
From orchestrating a multi-billion-dollar divestiture at ArvinMeritor to leading global infrastructure transformation at Faurecia, my career has been built around solving complex, high-stakes IT challenges. Each role reinforced the same lesson: technology leadership is not about systems—it’s about strategy, execution, and the trust of people who depend on them.
