Milacron Overview

The purpose of this page is to clarify my 20 year career with Cincinnati Milacron (MZ) that is not transparent in the chronological order of my resume. I voluntarily resigned from MZ in 1999 and the President asked me to return in 2004 to head up their business unit global IT operation. MZ was comprised of three business units; Industrial Machinery, Plastic Injection Molding, and Fluids. Oversight of the three business units was facilitated by a corporate entity. My Milacron story ….

During the first fifteen years that I was with MZ, they were a custom grown shop and with Y2K coming, they went to JD Edwards (JDE) World as their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution.  I was responsible for the selection, evaluation, and successful implementation of JDE in 1999.  I resigned in 1999. During my absence of about four to five years, MZ was in an acquisition mode. They were finding it difficult to absorb the newly acquired companies into their ERP system. They had failed in putting in some significant upgrades. As a result, the President asked me to return to head up the Plastics business unit IT department as its Global Director of Information Technology. In that role, I was responsible for all aspects of IT; application development, e-Commerce, telecommunications, etc. I was also responsible for the global enterprise infrastructure; maintaining the day-to-day operation of two data centers, one here in the US and one in Belgium.

Because of my team’s success in 1999 in implementing JDE at the business unit level, MZ Corporate decided to make JDE the platform of choice for the entire organization, which included the other two business units and the corporate entity. We decided to implement the latest release of JDE, which was Enterprise One instead of World. 

At the business unit level, we were migrating away from World A7.3 to Enterprise One 8.11 (E1).  The migration was very extensive from a technology standpoint in that we were going to the windows based client server architecture in (E1), migrating away from the DB2/AS400 green screen platform in (World). At the corporate level we embarked upon a totally new implementation of E1; and this was their initiation into the ERP landscape.

The corporate implementation of E1 began six months before the implementation at the business unit I was responsible for. The implementation at the business unit was completed on time and on budget, while the corporate roll out was struggling significantly. Consequently, the President and the Board of Directors (BOD), called upon me to get an understanding of what made my team a success and to determine whether those practices could be applied at the corporate level. I provided the President and BOD with a detailed assessment along with a high-level strategic plan to right the ship. As a result of this analysis, they asked me to come on board as their first Chief Information Officer. The top priority was to help turnaround the challenged corporate implementation worldwide.

The learning curve and the cultural impacts of going to any ERP system are huge. Fortunately, I have navigated through this complex landscape many times. In addition, I reorganized the IT organization to ensure business alignment, eliminated infrastructure redundancies, while improving the cost structure and operational effectiveness. The end resulted in the creation of a solid foundation as we evolved to a shared service delivery model. The new organizational structure generated positive results under an adverse economic climate. I have been in the trenches and have the scars to prove it.

My experience at MZ was very rewarding. I trust that this summation helps. I recommend reading my Career Summary for additional career particulars.

Derrick Green