Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2009 - (Page 30)

A sizable whiteboard, covered with notes scrawled in black mark er, hangs along one wall of Autumn Ba yles’ air y, sunlit office . Binders and pa pers are stack ed neatl y on her desk. Sketches of her compan y’s new headquarters, whose construction she’ s o verseeing, r est upright on the floor , pro pped against another wall. It’s a pretty standard corporate setting fo r a senior vice president for strategic operations. But in the center of the large conf erence table that str etches underneath the whiteboar d is a basket .lled with packages of Tastykakes, the iconic Philadelphia pastries that h ave sustained countless school kids, campers, and late-night snackers. The basket is not sitting on the table because Bayles has a sweet tooth. It is there for professional reasons: Bayles may not wield a spatula or run a mixer, but with a Blackberry and a briefcase, she’s every bit as important to Tasty Baking Company’s success as her bakery colleagues. Bayles runs Tasty’s operations, manufacturing, and supply-chain functions, while also shepher ding the construction of the company’s new, state-ofthe-art bakery and headquarters. “I wear two hats,” she says. “I work on this”— here she points to the ar tist’s renderings of the new facility— “but then I also am very focused on our front operations. We’re a bakery, so it’s not like we can bake a bunch of stuff and lea e it there v for a year and then pay attention to this.The stuff only lasts a couple of da ys. We have a couple of weeks, a couple of da ys on cer tain items. Every day has to be a good day in a bakery.” After graduating fr om Lehigh in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, Bayles hooked up with Price waterhouse’s consulting arm. Following the accounting rm’ s merger with Coopers & Lybrand, the new company set up its consultants in a separate division within the company. But when the Enron asco took down Andersen Consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers, now skittish about ha ving its consulting division linked with its auditors, sold the section to IBM. The move would have repercussions for Bayles. “I didn’t want to work for a huge conglomerate,” she says. “Once the IBM merger happened, I hung out for a little while , and then I sor t of g ured I preferred a smaller environment.” Before long, a f ormer classmate fr om the Wharton School, where Bayles had earned her MBA, came calling. He had recently accepted the chief nancial ofcer’ s post at Tasty Baking and wanted to kno w if Ba yles was inter ested in the company’s open chief information ofcer slot. “Having that thought in the back of my head that, gee , I r eally missed the smallness of Pricewaterhouse—not that it’ s small, but it had sort of a family rm feeling—I kind of yearned to go back,” she says. “It was a great opportunity. I said, ‘Do I get free cupcakes?’ They said yes. I said, ‘I’ll take the job.’” Among Bayles’ rst assignments was implementing an enterprise r esource planning system at Tasty’s aging facilities. She gradually took on other roles and in time was promoted to her cur rent position. While r etaining her operational r esponsibilities, Ba yles is also spearheading the construction project that will see the company relocate later this y ear from Philadelphia’s Hunting Park section to the old Navy Yard in South Philly. That part of her job has brought new challenges. Bayles is spearheading construction of Tasty Baking Company’s new stateof-the-art bakery and headquarters, shown LEHIGH UMNIULLETIN 30 in this artist’s rendering. AL B

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2009

Lehigh Bulletin - Winter 2009 Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Research Arts & Culture Sports Teaming Up to Tackle Global Challenges Positively 4th Street A Sweet Job From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News

Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2009

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