Chris Easterwood Email Address

Vice President, ITS Platform Engineering and Infrastructure and Integration Center of Excellence

The Mechanical Engineering Program at Auburn University offers a hands-on design lab for undergraduate students, graduate students, and doctoral candidates.

For the past 22 years, Chris has worked in a variety of roles within the IT department at Southwire Company including system programming, system engineering, and technical services. In the mid 1990’s, Chris ran implementations for the IT infrastructure supporting the recently written warehouse management and shipping system for Southwire. This included the installation and testing for a multitude of remote locations adding to the efficiency of those operations. In 1999, Chris led the effort to get the production computing infrastructure Y2K ready for Southwire. This included a myriad of upgrades and replacements to varying systems throughout the company and its remote locations. This was also the time period during which he took over the management of the IT Technical Services and Operations group. In the early 2000’s, Chris led an effort to move the sales agents (non-Southwire employees that sell Southwire products) off dedicated T-1’s and remote servers to a web-based system eliminating cost and reliability issues in the sales area. In 2010, the telecom, EDI, and IT support areas were added as responsibilities. During the last few years, he moved mobile support over from Blackberry to iPhones/iPads. He also worked with the SAP program team to implement the first phase of SAP which included a portion of materials management, procurement, financials, and controls. His areas within this were the SAP Basis group, security, and the web interface for procurement. He is currently working with the SAP program team on the second phase of SAP which is manufacturing, remaining materials management, and quality management. In this phase he is leading the SAP Center of Excellence which has the Basis, Security, Master Data, Change Management, and Project Management functions. Over the year 2016 he managed a project to replace the aging HR and payroll systems with SuccessFactors and ADP.