KKR has appointed Arthur Brohinsky, former executive vice president of SmartOps, as a director responsible for leading the firm’s Lean Six Sigma efforts.
KKR has appointed Arthur Brohinsky, former executive vice president of SmartOps, as a director responsible for leading the firm’s Lean Six Sigma efforts.
Brohinsky will join KKR’s portfolio operations team, KKR Capstone.
KKR Capstone works in partnership with KKR’s private equity investment professionals and portfolio company management teams to improve portfolio company operations. Brohinsky joins the group’s existing team of functional experts, which includes recent hires Todd Cooper, director responsible for procurement, and Jeffrey R. Smith, director responsible for information technology.
Dean B. Nelson, founder of KKR Capstone, says: ‘Central to KKR’s private equity investing approach is the long-held belief that value is created by improving the operations and performance of the companies in which we invest. At KKR Capstone, our mission is to address, over the lifetime of an investment, the most important operational value-creation levers in order to improve the performance of a portfolio company.’
Lean Six Sigma is a data-driven approach to improving a company’s business processes, resulting in higher margins, revenue growth, cost management, and more efficient use of capital.
Brohinsky, who is based in New York, started his career at Shell Oil Company in manufacturing engineering, supply chain, and risk management positions. After graduating from Harvard Business School, he worked at McKinsey before joining SmartOps, a provider of manufacturing and supply chain software and consulting services, where he was most recently the executive vice president.
Cooper, who is based in Menlo Park, spent several years leading procurement activities at Honeywell Aerospace before joining KKR Capstone in 2008. As KKR Capstone’s procurement lead, Cooper is focused on driving procurement transformation in select companies, as well as aggregating and negotiating indirect spend contracts across all of KKR’s companies.
Smith, who joined KKR Capstone in 2008, is a 29-year veteran of Accenture, where he held a number of leadership positions, including global managing partner for retail and consumer goods, managing partner for technology innovation and research, and managing partner for North America SAP-consumer industries. Smith’s role as IT leader for KKR Capstone is to focus on value creation, working with portfolio company management in areas where IT makes a major impact on the investment case. Smith is based in New York.
