New CIOs at Chiquita Brands and Newgen

This was the week of enterprise-wide management changes. To wit…

Chiquita Brands International is going bananas with management changes. The company promoted Manjit Singh, its VP of corporate information technology, to CIO earlier this week.  His promotion was part of broad organizational changes the company announced on October 4 that are intended to spur innovation and growth and make “cold chain management” a core competency. Singh reports to Fernando Aguirre, the produce company’s chairman and CEO.  He succeeds Waheed Zaman, who served as CIO *and* SVP of global supply chain and procurement. Zahman is now focused solely on the company’s global supply chain.

Singh joined Chiquita in April 2006 from Gillette. As the consumer products company’s director of Asia Pacific business systems based in Singapore and regional CIO, he “combined three independent IT organizations into a single unit responsible for all Asia Pacific IT operations,” according to the Chiquita press release. He also created a project management office and was behind the creation of a project development and approval process tailored to Asia Pacific’s. He’s familiar with Six Sigma and has also led an ERP implementation for Gillette.

RPM International is also doling out the promotions.  Yesterday, the Medina, Ohio-based holding company announced it had appointed Paul G. Hoogenboom CIO and senior vice president of manufacturing and operations.  Since 2001, Hoogenboom had served as CIO and VP of operations so manufacturing is a new responsibility.  In that role, he was in charge of managing capital spending, integrating the company’s IT systems and coordinating manufacturing, distribution, and the purchasing of raw materials.  Hoogenboom originally joined RPM in 1999 to lead its e-commerce subsidiary.    

Loyalty programs provider Newgen announced a new generation of executive managers. Among them is Tim Willcox, who joins the wholly-owned TeleTech subsidiary as its VP and CIO from Scientific Atlanta. As the cable company’s director of technology, he was responsible for an SAP implementation.