Waddington North America

Waddington, North America (http://wna.biz WNA) is a leading manufacturer of disposable drinkware, dinnerware, servingware, cutlery and custom packaging with a broad line of upscale products. It employs over 1,000 employess across 5 manufacturing facilities in the US and Canada. The company is headquartered in Covington, KY

WNA HQ, Kentucky

WNA was originally a games manufacturer based in the UK. It expanded into the packaging business in the US. In the later 1990's Waddington PLC in the UK was sold to Hasbro and the US interests were sold to a private equity group called CHS. Under CHS the company acquired a number of niche manufacturers of disposable foodservice items and grew to become the leading manufacturer of these items in its market.

In 2007, CHS sold their interests in WNA to two new private equity groups. (CVC and http://www.nep.com NEP)

I joined WNA in July 2003 having been a consultant on the IFS ERP Implementation for the previous twelve months. I assumed the role as IT Director although the role was primarily focused on completing and rolling out the IFS implementation across all sites. It soon came apparent that WNA had no IT infrastructure much less an identifiable IT department given that at the time, WNA was more of a loosely related group of companies reporting to the same parent, each with their own organizational and IT structure. I saw my role as pulling these disparate IT structures together to enable WNA to function as one cohesive group.