Rob Porterfield

As vice president of manufacturing for National Instruments, Rob Porterfield oversees the worldwide manufacturing organization including purchasing, production, operations, and services. Porterfield directs team efforts on continuously improving customer satisfaction and production efficiency, lowering material costs, reducing quoted product lead times, managing inventory levels, and ensuring the timely release of new products into production.

Porterfield led efforts in 2010 to open NI's second international production site in Malaysia. This site serves not only the production expansion needs of NI but also acts as a regional distribution and repair center for Asia. In 2001, Porterfield managed the opening of NI's first international production facility in Hungary, which went from ground breaking to production in just four months. The site has since delivered millions of dollars in cost savings to both NI and its customers around the globe. Prior to his work in Hungary, Porterfield led the creation of an NI software duplication center in Ireland and repair centers in Europe, Japan, and Singapore.

In 2007, Porterfield coordinated the centralization of the Americas, Europe, and Japan distribution into a single center in Hungary. By working with logistics partners and strategically rebalancing the company's global inventory, Porterfield improved delivery times to customers, provided better global product availability, and achieved operational efficiency improvements that save NI millions of dollars annually.

Since 2008, Porterfield has sponsored NI's corporate cost reduction initiatives, in part to continuously work with the purchasing and operations teams to increase efficiencies in global supply chains. Through these efforts, and others across the corporation, NI has seen some of its highest gross margins over the last three years. Under his leadership, the company has also seen record customer satisfaction ratings and on-time delivery rates.

Since joining NI in 1993 as a warehousing supervisor, Porterfield has held positions as materials manager, planning manager, director of international operations and global planning, and director of international operations and global supply chain. Prior to joining NI, Porterfield worked as a design engineer at General Dynamics. He holds a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from Auburn University and a master's degree in business administration from The University of Texas at Austin.