Nagaraja K Naik

Senior leader with over 16 years of expertise in supply chain and procurement, specializing in process excellence, data stewardship & Solution delivery. Proven ability to analyze data for actionable insights that drive business value. Good track record in driving operational value and fostering a strong organizational culture

Experienced in leading global operations teams and managing digital transformation projects across multiple industries, including the consumer and pharma sectors, with a strong focus on teamwork.

Seasoned professional with a deep understanding of strategic business planning and development. Strengths include strong leadership, effective communication skills, decision making abilities, and problem-solving capabilities. Have consistently delivered results in previous roles by driving operational efficiency, enhancing team productivity, and implementing innovative management strategies.

• Master data, quality, and governance
• Supply chain and procurement
• Operation management, solution delivery
• Eye for automation and process excellence
• Data and analytics 101

• Cycling mostly on roads, and occasional trail biking
• World cinema from different cultures, languages, and regions
• Avid football fan, Liverpool FC
• Love theater and traditional arts
• Geopolitics

• Recognized for the successful transition of on-shelf availability processes at Unilever for the year 2014
• Received a certificate of excellence for the successful pilot of RPA implementation in Unilever MDM for the year 2018, and the success story was published in the Unilever global newsletter
• Received the prestigious Innovation & Culture Award in GSK for the year 2021, which involved a certificate signed by the CEO of GSK, a complementary cash award, and an offer to visit the GSK head office in London as part of the global announcement
• Got recognized as a hot skill for the year 2022 at GSK, which involves a cash award with a certificate, as part of GSK’s global recognition program received several silver and bronze nominations for my work in P2P data and governance space, which involves a certificate with a cash award

Robotic process automation pilot and implementation (2017–2019)

For any operations team that wants to achieve excellence, continuous improvement is at the center of everything they do, as our quest to improve, innovate, and automate. Unilever's global data operations team's core leadership, of which I was also a part, took a decision to pilot a tactical solution for some of the manual activities, and I was tasked with working on a POC for an identified RPA solution, and leading the implementation

Having started alone with a couple of RPA consultants for the POC of a small process, I was successful in scaling it up in a matter of 12 to 14 months, in collaboration with third-party service providers. I successfully led a team of four developers to deliver more than 24 large-scale automations, which helped us save eight FTE worth of manual work

Supply chain digital transformation project, a global-scale transformation program aimed at improving speed, quality, and efficiency of end-to-end master data setup by driving process change and implementing some of the best-in-class strategic applications for master data stewardship and maintenance

E2E supply chain master data digital transformation (2018-2020)

As part of the Supply Master Center of Excellence team at Unilever, I was at the heart of driving this change, partnering closely with the core supply chain, local markets, and IT. As a pre-work to the project, I delivered a detailed master data dictionary covering all the fields relating to the product, which included the definition of the field, field owner, usage, and technical details, which became a base for all the technical development in the project. As a product owner, working with the larger team, I delivered a product life cycle management tool, which was used as a base template for a global solution

As a system and data integration lead, working with a team of SAP consultants, I delivered a detailed end-to-end process and data/system flow design

As GSK’s future data and governance strategy, work from an existing enterprise data office was transitioned to a new services team as part of GSK's global capability-building strategy

Transition of procurement data governance (2020–2022)

As part of the transition, I led the transition of procurement data governance and stewardship activities, which included rigorous planning, transition, and change management, from data solutioning, remediation, validation, standardization, and quality improvement, everything was smoothly transitioned under my leadership

In a matter of 6 months, the transition project was live, considering the fact that procurement is an ever-busy domain, this was an achievement, as the transition was completed successfully with no incidents or issues

TSA exit and procurement digital transformations (2024-ongoing)

As a Procurement COE leader, I was tasked with leading the Kenvue TSA program for the procurement data and analytics stream, which involved understanding the existing procurement data and analytics capabilities in detail and recreating them as part of TSA, working with IT partners. This was a very challenging project, as we had less than a year to deliver the project, and I didn't inherit the project in a good state because of the TSA complexities. Under my leadership, we delivered some key data analytics capabilities well within the TSA, which are used by categories to drive the business plan and savings

This journey and experience have helped our team land the multimillion-dollar procurement digital transformation program