Alison Smith
About Alison Smith
Alison Smith is the Maintenance Manager at Brown-Forman in Louisville, Kentucky, where she has worked since 2020. She combines her analytical skills with a focus on people leadership, coaching supervisors and managing operations while implementing long-term improvement plans.
Work at Brown-Forman
Alison Smith has served as the Maintenance Manager at Brown-Forman since 2020. In this role, she is responsible for overseeing day-to-day operations while also managing long-term improvement plans. Based in Louisville, Kentucky, she combines her analytical skills with a focus on people leadership. She coaches offshift supervisors to enhance their leadership capabilities and empowers employees to utilize lean manufacturing tools for continuous improvement.
Previous Experience
Prior to her current position, Alison Smith worked at General Mills as a Platform Lead from 2014 to 2020. She also held roles at Veterans Affairs Hospital - St. Louis as a Senior Design Project from 2010 to 2011, and as a Langley Aerospace Research Summer Scholars (LARSS) Program Intern at NASA Langley Research Center in 2009. Additionally, she gained experience as a Summer Intern at Sud-Chemie in 2007 and as a Research & Development Intern at Genscape, Inc. in 2008.
Education and Expertise
Alison Smith holds a Bachelor's Degree in Systems Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, which she completed from 2007 to 2011. She furthered her education by obtaining a Master's Degree in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University, where she studied from 2011 to 2014. Her educational background supports her expertise in analyzing production and reliability KPIs, as well as her role in system improvement.
Leadership and Team Building
In her role as Maintenance Manager, Alison Smith focuses on building a unified team and fostering a collaborative work environment. She acts as the single point owner for system improvement in critical areas such as human and food safety, production KPIs, and equipment reliability. Alison works with cross-functional teams to develop technical solutions for safety issues, emphasizing the importance of teamwork in achieving operational goals.