Pfizer names new leader for Lincoln plant
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By MATT OLBERDING/Lincoln Journal Star
The Lincoln Pfizer plant is getting new leadership.
Elizabeth Williams, a 28-year Pfizer veteran, will become the Lincoln site leader Sept. 1.
Williams will replace Rick Saffee, who has left the company.
When asked whether Saffee, who had been in charge in Lincoln since July 2003, left voluntarily or was fired, Pfizer spokesman Rick Chambers would say only that Saffee, “left to pursue other opportunities.”
Williams comes to Lincoln from a Pfizer Animal Health plant in Exton, Pa., where she has been the site leader since 2006. Before that, she was the site leader at Pfizer’s Animal Health plant in Lee’s Summit, Mo., in suburban Kansas City, where she started her career as a microbiologist in 1980.
In addition to leading the Lincoln plant, which is at 601 W. Cornhusker Highway, Williams will have oversight of Pfizer operations in Laurinburg, N.C., and White Hall, Ill., as well as temporary oversight of a plant in Omaha that is closing.
An internal announcement to Pfizer’s Lincoln employees said Williams would be expected to “drive appropriate change and effectively execute the (global manufacturing) and Animal Health business strategies in pursuit of competitive advantage in the global Animal Health market.”
Pfizer is in the final stages of a reorganization that is transforming the Lincoln plant into Pfizer’s global center for the research and production of animal health vaccines.
As part of that reorganization, the company has eliminated or relocated about 200 employees as pharmaceutical manufacturing operations have been moved elsewhere, reducing the local workforce from around 800 to 594, Chambers said.
Another 40 or so jobs are expected to be eliminated by the end of the year as the final remnants of the pharmaceutical manufacturing operations leave Lincoln, he said.
Despite the job cuts, Pfizer has invested around $125 million in Lincoln since 2003, including about $76 million in the past couple of years for three projects related vaccine research and production.
Reach Matt Olberding at 473-2647 or molberding@journalstar.com.
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