About five years ago, Irene Jeremic was approached by Stork Craft Manufacturing, a local 1,500-employee company, to perform an IT makeover of the entire corporation and establish business solutions for advanced commerce.
In response to emerging low-cost labour markets in Asia, the company took manufacturing offshore, but still could not compete having relied on obsolete business solutions, manual procedures and inefficient workflow.
Jeremic accepted the challenge as Stork Craft’s chief information officer and head of e-commerce, IT and sales services, leading her teams through e-commerce growth from 5% to 50% of the corporate business and establishing the first Internet channel for Wal-Mart and Stork Craft in Canada.
Now also a corporate executive adviser at Stork Craft, which makes and distributes baby furniture, Jeremic is helping steer the company through a major product-recall crisis.
In 2005, Jeremic first performed a comprehensive business-process evaluation and initiated an organization-wide cultural change that transformed vital parts of the business. In the same year, she designed an award-winning business infrastructure that hosted new Internet solutions before engineering a new e-commerce model that shortened delivery time to two to three days from from three to four weeks.
The model rekindled an e-commerce partnership with Toys “R” Us in the U.S. and set a framework for unlimited business growth. With her teams, Jeremic integrated e-commerce with the largest North American retail chains: Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target, Sears, Costco, United Consumer Club and others.
With a background in engineering and a computer science degree from Simon Fraser University, Jeremic completed her MBA at Athabasca University.
Before joining Stork Craft, Jeremic was vice-president for business and customer relations at eLearningSolutions, a spinoff company of SFU.
Her secret to success, she says, is quickly creating a vision.
“I immediately start executing it. Then I keep working until done – not until the clock says it’s time to go home.” •
