Harold Bevis, Xerium CEO and president, announced the creation of the new position of executive vice president of global human resources and the filling of that position with the hiring of Mike Bly as the company’s new global leader of all human resources. Bly will be responsible for all of Xerium’s human resources including wage plans, benefit plans, insurance, union contracts, incentive plans, personal goals and objectives, human resource management systems, and career planning.

“Xerium has two objectives with this move. First, we want to instill stronger pay-for-performance regimens across all people and processes,” says Bevis. “Xerium has begun a multi-year journey to create an enterprise that sets and meets its commitments to shareholders, customers and employees. The markets that Xerium serves have fundamentally changed in the last few years and we must change our human resource approaches in order to compete and win in this environment.

“Second, we need to establish more contemporary regimens within the human resource function itself. Many of our current habits are outdated and need to be brought up to contemporary standards. We have a big opportunity to leverage our scale better, simplify our network of activities and organize and group common areas of work. This organizational move will enable that to happen naturally. All human resource personnel will report to Mike with dotted line reporting to the regional presidents.”

“I am excited to join Xerium at this time in its history and look forward to creating value for our employees, customers and investors,” says Bly. “Simply stated, my job is to increase the output of our human resources and align our incentive structures around a pay-for-performance philosophy. That always involves consistent cost avoidance and reduction, metric and process improvement, simplification and automation. Cultural change and advancement is a key sustainable objective. I truly enjoy doing this, am experienced and have done it with Harold Bevis before. I understand his sense of urgency and his performance expectations. We are on the same page. I look forward to leading Xerium’s human resource function and resetting our agenda. It will be exciting and fun.”

Bly has 28 years of experience leading human resource and manufacturing functions, quality, supply chain, lean manufacturing, materials optimization and substitution, standardized manufacturing systems, per unit cost reduction, customer service, and M&A operational integrations. He formerly served as the vice president of human resources for Mr. Bevis at Pliant Corporation. During that time, Pliant renegotiated all of its union contracts; achieved top-tier wage and benefit benchmarks; consolidated multiple plants and expanded multiple plants. Most recently, Bly served as viice president of human resources at Berry Plastics (acquired Pliant Corporation in December 2009) where he had responsibility for the flexible packaging division’s human resource function.