John Reid
General Manager @Wilkie
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WORK HISTORY
General Manager @Wilkie
Kirriemuir, GB
Fun! Fun! Fun! Leading the UK Manufacturing group for Wilkie has been and continues to be a blast! What a joy it is to work in a can do company with a team of passionate, up for it! people. In the last couple of years our growth was 65%, increasing from £20m turnover per year to £34m in the last financial year.We\'ve managed to install and ramp-up 80 more looms, new coating and processing lines, create a new factory in Forfar and a brand new warehouse for raw materials and finished goods and recruit and train 100 more people to operate them. In 2023 we worked with the entire Wilkie team and created our new Vision for 2028 and our Core Values to govern our delivery of it. Our rapid deployment of Lean is underway and significant gains have already been made in all aspects of the business. We\'re in the middle of a full roll out of our S & OP process and like our experience with lean the team is soaking it up like a sponge.We have a new Manufacturing, Finance and Sales team in place with the resources and competences to deliver our very ambitious and aggressive growth plan. Our Technology Strategy is under development in partnership with NMIS and we\'re developing our Sales and Marketing Strategies with help from Johnston Carmichael and Equator.Our current to do list is to secure a new ‘state of the art’ Wilkie Factory powered by 100% renewable energy. We\'re developing our Innovation and R&D capabilities to support our growth and technology strategy. Our roll out of lean and Digitalisation continues. We have a significant people programme underway focussing on empowerment and engagement to drive performance, productivity and development opportunities for our teams. We aim to become a \'Fair Work\' Benchmark. This programme comes with a complete review of our terms and conditions to modernise our people culture and management practises.
EDUCATION
University of Strathclyde
Master of Engineering - MEng, Manufacturing Sciences and Engineering
ABOUT JOHN REID
On the 6th of November 2018 at 8:30am my worst day at work started. I entered the warehouse to address 850 world class Dundonians. After 26 years as a member of this team and 8 years as it’s leader I now had the heart-breaking job of confirming what had been cruelly leak to them on national TV the night before. Our wonderful factory was to close. As I looked round the room all the faces were familiar but the expressions were not. There were tears, anger and saddest of all, blank stares.Throughout my time in the Factory we fought and schemed and planned and changed to keep the place going. We were told to close the factory in 2005 but after months of work we finally succeeded in changing that decision and lived to fight another day. In 2008 we succeeded again but in 2018 we were undone by mass Chinese imports.The cruel irony was that we’d just completed a £90m investment plan, we thought we’d finally made it. In fact the CEO of the Michelin group had publicly predicted 25 more years at a mass meeting with my team on the amazing occasion of a visit to our Factory from none other than the Queen herself and Prince Philip. The full spectrum, from an amazing high to the lowest of lows!When we worked to close the plant we decided that we’d do it our way. We’d raise the team for our last and most important challenge. The Mission was…… \"We need to be at our absolute best, this will be our last and most powerful demonstration that this Team can beat the odds and confound the critics!We’re going to do this our way, we’re going to be positive and confident, enjoy our successes and leave our Factory with our heads held high!On the 30th of June 2020 we did just that. I had the privilege of leading the remaining 150 of our World Class Dundonians off the site flanked by my old friend Jack, the last of the original 1971 apprentices and Marc the Senior Shop Steward. Our Pipe Band swung round in front of us. We left the site together with our Heads Held High!
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