**Director, Transportation** Your Role: As Director, Transportation, you will be responsible for leading all operational aspects of the following transportation modes, at Ardent Mills: Truck, Intermodal, Less Than Truckload, Ocean, and Air. This is a global role covering approximately $250M in spend across 40 primary sites and 20 secondary sites across U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico. You will be accountable for developing and utilizing strategies to improve customer service efficiency and cost optimization. As a leader and people manager with 4-7 direct reports, the Ardent Mills Values of trust, serving, simplicity, and safety will guide your decisions. You will listen, learn, and serve your team members. You will enable your team to deliver superior business results by constantly learning, reinventing, and challenging yourself and others to do better. You will inspire people to achieve things they never thought possible. To succeed, you must be able to: - Deliver results in first-time situations by inspiring others and working to earn trust every day. - Serve others with understanding, respect, and care. - Operate with simplicity, clarity, and transparency. - Deal with and drive change. - Organize, prioritize, and own multiple tasks while meeting or exceeding deadlines. Above all you will be expected to carry out all your activities with reliability, integrity, compliance and in a safe, environmentally responsible, and efficient manner. **Your responsibilities**: - Ensure customer requirements by leading the delivery of daily truck execution in coordination with the Sr. Truck Manager and regional transportation analysts - Partner with transportation providers to develop and utilize joint scorecards to find efficiencies, capture value and deliver customer satisfaction. - Facilitate alignment, communication, and direction between business partners in sales, customer service, planning, transportation, operations, and warehousing, regarding carrier service capabilities, continuous improvement initiatives, and issue resolution - Develop and maintain transportation partnerships while creating a balanced and long-term strategy (# carriers/site, asset vs 3PL, drop vs live, CPU, customer load out, etc.) to optimize service and minimize risk for the business - Accountable that all carriers have met all company, local and federal requirements, are onboarded and set up proactively for flawless execution in compliance, tendering, timely delivery, reporting, EDI and invoicing - Optimization of specialized transport needs for unique grain requirements including low volume, special handling, expedited timing - Leverage industry technologies (ie.TMS, RFP tools, etc) to deliver exceptional service, optimized price and clear visibility for stakeholders and customers. This includes bolt on technologies that enhance the TMS. - Develop and implement transportation RFPs Processes including minibids, auctions, sourcing events through the leveraging of data and analytics - Identify and deliver cost optimization targets to meet financial statement objectives in conjunction with development of team members acumen and solutions - Streamline freight claims, carrier invoice payment process, and rate requests through process documentation and detailed improvements - Build trust by partnering with sales, operations, and customers to develop creative, cutting-edge solutions - Develop and evolve the transportation team structure and team members. Coach direct reports to enhance their skill sets and position them for future growth opportunities. **Essential Skills and Experience**: - Bachelor’s Degree in Transportation, Supply Chain or related field with 7 years transportation experience or 10+ years transportation experience - Experience leading teams and influencing other functions - Ability to identify business need, develop plan of action, garner resources and achieve success - TMS experience - Experience interacting with customers - Advanced negotiation skills - Analytical skills and proven ability to understand and resolve complex operational issues **Good to have**: - Other transportation mode experience: IM, Ocean, Air, dray - Ops and warehouse experience - Food and Beverage, especially Ag experience **Other Considerations**: - Ability and willingness to travel up to 30% **At Ardent Mills, everyone matters, and everyone has a voice. We are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal opportunities are available to all applicants and team members and the decisions will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, national origin, aboriginality, ancestry, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, genetic information, veteran status, age, political affiliation, or any other non-merit character