1. Karon Evanoff, vice president of global supply chain at HID
Global, asks two common-sense questions that demonstrate
projected annual savings of more than $8 million dollars
By J E F F L I N K
Where’s Our Stuff
and How Are
We Moving It?
P R O F I L E M A G A Z I N E Q1/16

2. After paying her way through
college at California State–
Fullerton, Orange County
native Karon Evanoff launched
into the world of advertising.
She had dreams of working her way into
fashion merchandising. But there was a
small problem—she hated advertising. The
clients she worked for were scattershot
and incongruous: fast food providers and
a couple of high-tech trade magazines. The
bigger issue was the disillusionment she felt
not having the ability to influence decision
making and being at the mercy of her clients’
wishes. “It wasn’t quite as glamorous as you
would imagine,” Evanoff says. “I realized I
didn’t really want to be on the side that is
told ‘no.’ I wanted to be on the side with the
money and the power of negotiation.”
So, after returning from a soul-searching
vacation to Australia in 1989, Evanoff started
looking for work in an entirely different in-
dustry. She was hired to work in the supply
chain group at Western Digital, a supplier
of data storage products and services based
in Irvine, California. She quickly rose to
the position of senior commodity manager.
Later, she held strategic sourcing and sup-
ply chain positions at Applied Micro Circuits
Corporation, Powerwave Technologies, and
SolFocus.
What did she learn from her varied pro-
fessional experiences? “I think it gave me
more confidence to know I could work at
that level, to be able to stand in front of a
group of executives and put my team in front
of senior leadership,” Evanoff says. “I’m not
by nature a patient person. I want to do
everything now, and it’s frustrating when
things take longer than expected. I want to
save more money and to be so much faster.”
Today, Evanoff is vice president of global
supply chain for HID Global, a secure identi-
ty solutions provider that works worldwide.
She is responsible for overseeing direct and
indirect spending of over $500 million glob-
ally, with oversight of more than fifty peo-
ple spread across the Americas, Asia, and
Europe. Nearly every facet of supply chain
operations that affects products arriving to
customers inexpensively and on time falls
under her watch, from global procurement
and strategic sourcing to master scheduling,
as well as sales and operations planning.
A rapidly growing subsidiary of Swedish
lock manufacturer Assa Abloy, HID Global
boasts several notable successes. It acquired
companies across the globe, including in
2014, Lumidigm—an Albuquerque-based
firm that developed a fingerprint identifica-
tion reader for secure banking. HID Global
opened a 10,000-square-foot Global Design
Center in Chennai, India, which became fully
operational in quarter four of 2015. It also
partnered with Cryogatt Systems to cre-
ate a radio frequency identification (RFID)
embedded tag to help deliver accurate and
timely records of materials stored cryogen-
ically. It has the patent on technology that
will link multiple security products together
on a single mobile phone or card, a seamless
integration that has attracted the attention
of a number of companies.
Still, the new line of innovative technol-
ogy products is in the youth stage of its life
cycle, Evanoff says, and the role of supply
chain is critical to maintain the value of old-
er technologies facing pressure from com-
petition as patents expire. “This industry as
a whole is young with respect to integrated
supply chain dynamics. Some people think
it’s about issuing a purchase order (PO) and
forgetting about it,” Evanoff says. “But you
have to realize who your customers are. You
can’t just place POs and hope it works when
you sell to large integrators of products who
have global presence, have been around a
long time, and are more developed in their
supply chain strategies and integration.
We’ve acquired so many companies in a rel-
atively short time period, all with individu-
al systems; we have to create an integrated
supply chain so they can all act as one HID.”
The order fulfillment map Evanoff saw
when she first came to HID Global was a
map so crowded with crisscrossed lines that
it was almost indecipherable. Rather than
sticking to business as usual, she asked two
simple but critical questions: “Where’s all
our stuff?” and “How are we moving prod-
ucts?” The answers helped her launch a ro-
bust network optimization study: analyzing
sales and inventory
region by region;
evaluating multiple
fulfillment centers
across the globe,
including in the
United States, Mid-
dle East, Africa, and
Karon Evanoff
VP of Global
Supply Chain
HID Global
Austin, TX
Karon Evanoff is responsible for overseeing
direct and indirect spending of over $500
million globally, with oversight of more than
fifty people spread across the Americas, Asia,
and Europe.

3. Better information. Better planning. Better
decisions. For businesses today, winning in the fast
moving, volatile marketplace demands real-time
decisions across every functional area and touch
point of their ecosystems.
And maximizing the impact of those decisions to
generate high company performance requires the
most relevant information, thorough collaboration,
and sharpest analytical insight available. That’s
where Steelwedge comes in. Steelwedge S&OP
helps leading organizations worldwide break down
organizational silos, enabling sales, marketing,
finance, operations, and executive leadership to
work collaboratively to confidently deliver high
quality, in-time business decisions that continuously
advance customer satisfaction and company value.
Asia; implementing consolidation plans to
optimize locations; planning for regularly
scheduled bulk shipments of goods rather
than repeated small shipments; and putting
the kibosh on high-cost expedited air ship-
ments as a default mode.
On the one hand, the plan, which Eva-
noff conservatively expects will yield an
annual savings of more than $8 million, is
marvelously complex because it is global.
The subtle intricacies of international trade
compliance, tariffs, product bans, and legal
encryption are handled by an internal im-
port/export group in association with var-
ied legal partnerships to ensure compliance
with all regulations and laws. On the other
hand, Evanoff’s plan is elegantly simple: “If
the majority of my customers are located in
central Europe, why would my distribution
center be located far away from there?” she
says. “It’s all about location, location, loca-
tion.”
With HID Global recently opening its
headquarters in Austin, Texas, staffing the
right team also has been important. Evanoff
says she is looking for analytic-minded indi-
viduals who can envision what effect their
actions will have on the future and come
equipped to solve problems on their own.
“I’m looking for people who have their own
ability to scale. I’m second generation. My
grandparents came from Italy and Russia
and instilled a strong work ethic. What you
have, you earned it,” she says. “As we move
forward, we’re facing entitlement, quite
honestly, that is what will impact the US’s
capacity to function. We have to level-set ex-
pectations. With many candidates, we face
the ‘everyone gets a trophy’ mind-set and
have to factor that into the talent equation.
It’s important to know that you have to earn
the trophy.”
“We’ve acquired so many companies in
a relatively short time period, all with
individual systems; we have to create an
integrated supply chain so they can all
act as one HID.”
KARON EVANOFF