Sr. Manager, Distribution

About the role

The Sr. Manager, Distribution at Pure Fishing is responsible for leading a large, complex omnichannel distribution center supporting retail, wholesale, marketplace, and ecommerce fulfillment operations. This position provides strategic and hands-on leadership for daily operations, people development, safety, service, inventory accuracy, cost management, and continuous improvement.

Essential Duties And Responsibilities

• Lead and direct daily distribution center operations, including receiving, put-away, replenishment, picking, packing, sortation, staging, shipping, returns, inventory control, and value-added services.
• Provide leadership to managers, supervisors, leads, and hourly associates across multiple departments, shifts, or operating windows.
• Ensure operational execution supports omnichannel fulfillment requirements, including ecommerce direct-to-consumer orders, retail replenishment, wholesale distribution, marketplace activity, parcel shipping, LTL/FTL shipments, and customer-specific requirements.
• Develop labor plans, staffing models, operating schedules, and workflow priorities aligned to volume forecasts, promotional activity, seasonality, peak periods, ecommerce growth, and service-level commitments.
• Monitor and improve facility performance against key operating metrics, including safety, quality, inventory accuracy, productivity, cost per unit, order cycle time, on-time shipping, dock-to-stock time, throughput, and customer service.
• Partner cross-functionally with transportation, planning, customer service, merchandising, technology, finance, human resources, safety, maintenance, and senior leadership to align distribution center execution with business priorities.
• Manage operating budgets, labor expense, overtime, supplies, equipment utilization, vendor support, and cost-control initiatives.
• Support and optimize warehouse technology and operational systems, including WMS, LMS, OMS, TMS, RF equipment, material handling systems, automation, and business intelligence tools.

Omnichannel and Ecommerce Growth

• Design and scale fulfillment processes that support rapid ecommerce growth while maintaining service levels for existing distribution channels.
• Balance competing channel priorities, including parcel fulfillment, LTL/FTL shipping, retail replenishment, customer-specific routing guides, marketplace requirements, and expedited orders.
• Lead capacity planning for labor, space, slotting, equipment, automation, and carrier throughput to support future order growth.
• Partner with technology and operations teams to optimize WMS/OMS logic, wave planning, batch picking, cartonization, inventory allocation, routing, and exception management.
• Prepare the operation for peak periods, promotional surges, holiday demand, product launches, and new customer/channel onboarding.

Continuous Improvement and Operational Excellence

• This position serves as a visible champion of continuous improvement and operational excellence.
• Develop and lead a continuous improvement roadmap focused on safety, quality, cost, service, productivity, space utilization, labor efficiency, inventory accuracy, and ecommerce scalability.
• Apply Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, 5S, standard work, visual management, root cause analysis, value stream mapping, and DMAIC methods to eliminate waste and improve process flow.
• Establish baseline performance, define target conditions, prioritize opportunities, and track financial and operational benefits from improvement initiatives.
• Create and maintain standard operating procedures, job instructions, process controls, daily management routines, and audit mechanisms to sustain improvements.
• Use operational data, WMS reporting, labor management insights, dashboards, time studies, and floor observations to identify bottlenecks, defects, rework, excess travel, poor slotting, congestion, and capacity constraints.
• Drive improvements in picking paths, slotting strategy, replenishment logic, pack station design, dock flow, wave planning, returns processing, inventory control, and carrier handoff.
• Promote associate engagement by creating feedback loops, recognition programs, problem-solving boards, and structured methods for frontline employees to submit and test improvement ideas.
• Partner with finance to validate savings, productivity gains, cost avoidance, and return on investment for labor, equipment, automation, and process changes.
• Ensure change management is embedded into every improvement project through communication plans, training, leader standard work, readiness reviews, and post-implementation audits.
• Develop supervisors and managers in continuous improvement thinking so the site can sustain a daily improvement culture rather than relying only on project-based events.
• Report progress to senior leadership with clear metrics, project status, risk mitigation plans, and recommendations for additional investment or support.

Leadership and Team Development

• Create a high-performance leadership team through coaching, accountability, succession planning, and development of managers, supervisors, leads, and associates.
• Set clear expectations, inspect performance, provide timely feedback, and hold leaders accountable for results and behaviors.
• Partner with HR on staffing strategy, recruiting, onboarding, retention, performance management, engagement, and workforce planning.
• Lead communication routines such as shift start-up meetings, tier meetings, KPI reviews, action planning sessions, and business reviews.
• Promote cross-training and flexible staffing models to support changing volume, channel mix, and ecommerce demand variability.