About Tom Kress
Personal
Tom was born and raised in the Midwest as part of a large family in Ohio. He has been blessed by his marriage to his wife, Joan, for over 35 years. They are the parents of 5 grown children who continue to bring them joy and make their life "interesting".
His career has provided the opportunity for them to live in numerous places around the US and they have enjoyed living from New England to the Wisconsin. Tom and Joan currently live in Milwaukee where they are busy enjoying all that this great city has to offer and doing what they can to make it even better place through involvement in non-profits and other organizations
Tom and Joan enjoy discovering new places, spending time with their children and extended family, getting outside for activities, and enjoying local festivals, parks, and beer gardens.
Career
My passion is providing solutions to complex issues through operational and strategic initiatives deployment. I bring unique skills and a people-focused approach to this that developed over a career filled with high-impact roles in various businesses situations.
Out of school, I held various roles in three General Electric businesses ranging from jet engines to electrical equipment. Here I built solid skills in continuous improvement, six sigma, operations leadership, and management of significant manufacturing projects.
After GE, I moved on to Danaher Corporation where I concentrated on lean implementation and defining and executing major improvements using their well-known Strategy Deployment process. The initiatives I led there included plant execution, cost, service improvement, and plant rationalization.
I leveraged this foundation at Rexnord Industries where I continued my focus with a much broader scope. There we achieved performance improvement through leveraging skills and technology between global sites, transferring production between locations, product offering simplification, and robust business processes. This culminated in defining and leading the North American manufacturing and supply chain footprint optimization. This multi-year initiative spanned from overall roadmap definition through hands-on execution. It delivered annual EBITDA improvement over $20M and sustainable and robust low-cost capability for production in Mexico
Over this experience, my approach has evolved to include a strong incorporation of team engagement, change management, and leadership capability to address more difficult issues and opportunities. It also includes the vital skill to transition ideas to execution that enable successful deployment.
My skills, experience and approach offer a unique ability to deliver impactful and sustainable improvement. This is deployed today through my consulting business, Strategy Accelerator, that aids clients define and deploy the operational and strategic initiatives critical to their success using an approach catered to their specific situation.
