Stephen Harrington serves as chief supply chain officer for Delaware North – a position based at the hospitality company’s global headquarters in Buffalo, N.Y. In his role, he leads all of Delaware North’s $1 billion annual global procurement program while overseeing its Procurement, Design & Construction, Culinary, Retail and Sustainability departments. He works with the company’s subsidiaries and operating units to lead centralized sourcing and procurement efforts and maximize value from suppliers. This includes working with internal stakeholders from initial needs identification to final goods and services delivery.
Since joining Delaware North in April 2017, Harrington has led a transformation of the procurement function by launching a strategic sourcing group, an enterprise procurement-to-pay platform and a category management approach. He oversaw the initiative to establish processes, governance and internal capabilities to support these efforts with a planned, disciplined and data-driven procurement approach – all focused on driving increased value and savings for Delaware North by leveraging the company’s scale and strategic supplier relationships.
Harrington has also strengthened Delaware North’s capabilities in design and construction management in regard to the company’s hundreds of millions of dollars in annual construction in airports, casinos, sports venues, hotels and restaurants. He also began overseeing corporate retail initiatives to better align them within category management.
Prior to joining Delaware North, Harrington spent more than eight years as chief procurement officer at M&T Bank, a leading super-regional financial institution based in Buffalo. While in that role, he was responsible for a group of 40 procurement professionals who managed more than $1.1 billion in spending.
Harrington’s career in procurement also includes serving as director of global supply chain procurement at Chiquita Brands in Cincinnati, where he was responsible for more than $1.3 billion in supply chain indirect spending in overseeing procurement teams in Belgium, Costa Rica and the United States. In addition, he was director of supply chain and non-production procurement – responsible for nearly $1 billion in spending – with Cadbury Schweppes in New Jersey, and he also served as a senior sourcing manager at Bank One in Columbus, Ohio. His first procurement position was director of indirect procurement at Warnaco in New York City.
He began his career as a petty officer in the United States Navy’s Construction Battalion (or “Seabees”). His service included Operation Desert Storm.
Harrington earned an MBA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a bachelor’s degree at Rochester Institute of Technology. Harrington and his wife, Lori, live in Orchard Park, N.Y., with their children, Keenan and Keira.