When I transitioned from Process Engineer to MEGA Regional Project Manager at Mars in 2019, the scope of my work expanded from a single facility to dozens of sites across North America and Latin America. The key to managing that scale wasn’t working harder. It was building better systems for visibility.

The Problem: Opacity at Scale

Managing MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Operations) supply across multiple manufacturing sites creates a visibility problem. Each site has its own:

• Vendor relationships
• SAP configurations
• Compliance patterns
• Performance gaps

Without systematic visibility, you’re flying blind. Issues hide until they become crises.

The Solution: Dashboard Everything

My approach was to build transparency through dashboards:

Vendor Compliance Heatmaps

• Color-coded site-by-site vendor performance
• Weekly tracking calls with preferred vendors
• Segment governance team visibility

Power BI Efficiency Dashboards

• Real-time efficiency and losses tracking
• SAE (Site Availability Efficiency) monitoring
• Automated data pulls from SAP

Ariba Reporting Tools

• Commercial data analysis
• Spend tracking against savings strategies
• Contract category mapping

The Results

This data-driven approach delivered measurable outcomes:

Metric	Before	After	Impact
SAE	74.6%	84.8%	+14% efficiency
Waste Rate	4.6%	1.9%	-59% reduction
PCC	$2,853/ton	$2,575/ton	-10% cost

Financial Impact:

• $815,000 Value Leadership Savings (2018)
• $200,000 annual material waste savings

The Technical Lift

Getting to this point required deep technical work:

1. SAP Classification Mapping: Learning how items are classified in SAP to map across contracted categories. This wasn’t glamorous work, but it was essential.

2. Inventory Calculator Automation: I developed approximately 50% of a solution to automate the SAP data pull for inventory calculations. Reducing manual work meant more time for analysis.

3. Data Lake Integration: Working with the data sprint subteam to bring live data into dashboards, replacing constant manual SAP reports.

4. Network Troubleshooting: When SAP scripting went down across the network, I found the solution and rolled it out to the entire maintenance diagnostics team.

Lessons for Product Management

This experience directly informs my perspective on product management:

Build for Visibility: Users don’t just need features; they need to see what’s happening. Dashboards aren’t nice-to-have; they’re core product.

Data Quality is Product Quality: The best analytics are worthless if the underlying data is messy. Invest in data hygiene.

Automate the Boring Parts: Every hour spent on manual data pulls is an hour not spent on analysis and decision-making.

Measure What Matters: SAE, PCC, waste rate: these aren’t arbitrary metrics. They directly tie to business outcomes.

The Cross-Functional Challenge

The hardest part wasn’t the technical work. It was getting alignment across functions:

• Finance needed different views than operations
• Site leads had different priorities than segment governance
• Vendors required different cadences than internal teams

Building dashboards that served multiple audiences while maintaining a single source of truth was the real product management challenge.

Looking Forward

Whether it’s MRO supply chain analytics or an AI-powered agentic platform, the principles are the same: build visibility, automate the tedious, measure what matters, and serve multiple stakeholders with coherent systems.

That’s what I’m looking to bring to my next role.