Advance Auto Parts names new CFO

Published October 5, 2016 by Veronica Garabelli

Roanoke-based Advance Auto Parts has named Thomas “Tom” Okray executive vice president and CFO, effective Oct. 31. He will succeed Mike Norona, who will remain with the company in an advisory role until the end of the year.

The move is part of Advance Auto Parts’ previously announced transition plan.  Okray joins Advance Auto Parts from Amazon, which he joined last year as vice president, finance, North American operations. In January, he became vice president, finance, global customer fulfillment. He was the finance lead responsible for optimizing key elements of Amazon's Global Fulfillment Network, including transportation and supply chain, capacity and labor planning and cost and productivity of fulfillment centers.

“Tom is very familiar with a supply chain that must respond rapidly to online demand,” Tom Greco, Advance Auto Parts’ president and CEO, said in a statement. “This will be increasingly critical to accelerating our growth at Advance going forward.”
Before joining Amazon, Okray held various leadership positions at General Motors, where he was most recently CFO, global product development, purchasing and supply chain.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Michigan State University and an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Advance Auto Parts, a major automotive aftermarket parts provider, operates 5,066 stores and 126 Worldpac branches while serving about 1,300 independently owned Carquest branded stores in the United States, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Canada. The company has 74,000 employees.