Trelleborg appoints president for N.A.
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FORT WAYNE, Ind.—Linda Muroski is coming full circle.
The executive recently was named president of Trelleborg A.B.'s Sealing Solutions' Americas operation, where she will head the U.S., Canadian and South American Business for Trelleborg Sealing Solutions.
One major factor in accepting the post with Trelleborg was that the company represents a return to her original background.
“Part of it is going back to my roots from when I first started working,” Muroski said. “But it comes back to the progressiveness of the culture. I probably spent as much time interviewing them as they did interviewing me.”
She spent the first 10 years of her career in the plastics industry—three with Johnson Controls and then seven with Niagara Plastics, a small independent firm based in Erie, Pa.
“The one I learned the most from was the family owned company,” Muroski said. “I learned a lot of background around all aspects of manufacturing. How the tool room worked, the sales and marketing, and other types of processes like the supply chain.”
She spent the last 16 years with BASF, where she held several leadership posts, most recently as director of water solutions for North America. With extensive sales and management experience, Muroski has led turnaround sales strategies successfully, including rationalization, operating cost control and reorganization plans, Trelleborg said.
BASF, however, did not bring her into its plastics division. She said she was hired because of her knowledge with regard to machining metal. With Niagara, an injection molding company, she worked closely with engineering to coat plastic pieces and the molds.
However she said she needed a change, and Trelleborg stood out to her with a ripe opportunity.
“The attraction to Trelleborg was the fact that it is very market and customer focused,” Muroski said. “It provides solutions and a service level to its customers which is much more than I've seen from any other company in the market place. I also like the fact that you can be entrepreneurial at Trelleborg. There is an element of risk taking to try these new things. We don't always know that everything is going to pan out when we try new things, but the tolerance for that is pretty remarkable within Trelleborg. They hire you because of your expertise, and they give you the freedom to operate.”
Muroski will oversee an Americas region that consists of five plants and 14 sales offices. The region is important strategically to Trelleborg Sealing Solutions with 25 percent of the unit's total sales coming from North America and about 19 percent of the work force located in the region.
She will have a more direct focus on the unit's Industrial hub, which consists of the life science, food and beverage, sanitary and water, fluid power, off-road construction, and springs, among a few others. Other directors oversee the firm's automotive, oil and gas, and aerospace hubs.
Life sciences, food and beverage, sanitary water, automotive and aerospace are areas of focus for the unit, she said.
“We need to continue to maintain our market leadership. We are doing this through continually improving processes for placing orders,” Muroski said. “We're really trying to make it easy to do business with Trelleborg.”
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