Becky Crane of General Mills — A Bright Future for Supply Chain and Manufacturing Career

The bluEPrint by Executive Platforms

At the 2024 edition of the North American Supply Chain Executive Summit series we sat down with Becky Crane, General Mills’ Vice President of Manufacturing & Engineering, to talk about how industry leaders are working to make careers in their manufacturing and supply chain organizations attractive to the next generation, especially in light of how people are thinking differently about their worklife-balance, goals, and expectations. Being an employer of choice is important, but how does a large manufacturing organization like General Mills find the right balance between being a great place to work and making sure the work gets done? In this interview, Becky talks about General Mills’ experience to date and the lessons learned she wants to share with other manufacturers and supply chain professionals to make sure they are making opportunities for their people to learn, grow, and make choices that benefit both themselves and their employers. For all this and more, give this episode a listen!
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Becky Crane
Vice President, Manufacturing & Engineering
General Mills
Becky Crane has 20 years’ experience at General Mills working across the company’s end-to-end supply chain, in multiple U.S. and international locations. Highlights include plant manager at one of our largest facilities (Hannibal, Mo.), as well as standing up a global procurement organization in Switzerland as an expat. She’s known for leveraging her breadth of experience to build bold strategies and highly effective cross-functional teams to solve problems and create long-term advantage for our businesses.

Crane leads manufacturing, engineering and global safety teams with accountability for over 9,000 employees (approximately 30% of the company’s employee base). This includes responsibility over $1B in capital across the enterprise, standardizing processes and establishing strong business partnerships to enable advantaged agility and accelerate innovation. In less than one year, her team stabilized line performance, reduced open headcount to less than 4% (industry leading), while delivering the capital plan.

Becky Crane joined General Mills in 2003 as a Distribution Management Associate at the Buffalo, N.Y., Flour Mill. Over the next 10 years, she held various roles with increasing responsibility moving around the U.S. in the process. Roles included Logistics Operations Planner (Minn.) for Yoplait, implementing a new planning system (Minn.), Logistics Manager (Avon, Iowa, and Buffalo, N.Y.), Operations Manager (Hannibal, Mo.) for Progresso Soup and Chewy Bars, and Supply Chain Development Manager (Walmart Sales; Bentonville, Ark.).

Crane stepped into two Plant Manager roles – first in Vineland, N.J., and shortly thereafter was approached to lead one of General Mills’ largest facilities in Hannibal, Mo. Continuing to broaden her experience, Crane embraced a unique opportunity as Director of Global Sourcing Packaging for Sourcing in Nyon, Switzerland. Upon her return stateside, Crane joined an executive leadership team, leading Supply Chain Transformation and Business Performance Management (BPM) for the North America Retail segment. Crane then stepped into an executive business leadership role as the Supply Chain Leader for the Morning Foods Operating Unit where she had accountability for the end-to-end supply chain.

Crane grew up in Golden Valley, Minn. and attended the University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management where she holds degrees in Marketing and Supply Chain Management. She and her family currently reside in the Minneapolis.