Polymer Group, Inc. (PGI) has restructured its organization, bringing its global leadership under one group (a Global Business Development unit) that will house its segment leadership, research and development, sales and marketing operations and strategic planning.

Executives feel this structure, which has also led to a reduction in personnel, will redirect its resources to provide a growth engine not only in the company’s current markets but also to allow for development of new market opportunities for its technologies and capabilities.

“We will continue to be aligned around our regions because our regions give us the ability to maintain close market contact and the ability to serve our customers on a local basis,” says Dennis Norman, CFO. “The GBD allows us to leverage our global scale across different markets to enable a consolidated hygiene, healthcare, wipes and filtration strategy leveraged across our entire global platform. PGI is going to the market under a single brand with a single market strategy and leveraging best of class within our network.”

Housing the company’s research and development efforts within the GBD unit will ensure PGI’s innovation capabilities are completely aligned with market demands.

Under the new structure, the former U.S. and Latin America region has been consolidated into a combined America region, which will be led by Scott Tracey. This new unit will be more customer and market facing and will enable it to leverage the strength of both of those regions into the consolidated corridor of the Americas as that market continues to evolve.

Meanwhile, the structure of the new organization is intended to allow PGI to leverage its operational excellence on the global stage. The establishment of the global supply chain group, which will be led by Mike Hale, marries procurement, process excellence, safety and the global engineering group to leverage value, Norman adds.

“Also, the new organization enables PGI to leverage the strength of its global scale to be able to deliver better value to the markets themselves and to allow it to bring innovation to the market quicker and to customers across multiple geographies,” he says.

Other top leadership team members include Jean Marc Galvez, who will run Europe; Leon Chang, in Asia; Norman, CFO; Mary Tomasello, global human resources and employee communications; Jim Infinger, global information systems; and Dan Rikard, law, general counsel and secretary. All will report directly to CEO Veronica Hagen.