QHow did you end up in the supply chain profession?
AI was going to the University of Southern California, thinking I was going to be an engineer, and I found a
course that I liked more through the business school called
“Marketing, Logistics and Transportation Management.” So
I entered that program in my sophomore year and ultimately got my undergraduate degree in business with a focus in
marketing, logistics, and transportation management.
QIn giving you the Distinguished Service Award, CSCMP noted that you were behind a number of
innovations in the field. Can you describe one of those
innovations and its impact?
ABack in 1998-1999, while I was help- ing J.B. Hunt Logistics set up a third-party services division that we eventually
named “Transplace,” we got involved with a
unique program in which we consolidated
loads from multiple shippers for delivery to
a common customer—or collaborative
transportation management. We worked
very closely with Wal-Mart and Procter &
Gamble to develop a pilot program.
[Today,] I am working through the center here on a similar program with a candy
manufacturer called Just Born. We are
developing a collaborative supply chain [with] other
candy companies [that will allow them] to co-load shipments going to the same locations. In the confectionery
industry, 75 to 90 percent of the shipments are LTL today.
If you can combine shipments going to the same destinations, you can change that to 90 percent truckload. … The
savings in transportation alone are somewhere around 20
to 25 percent.
QWhat other innovations were you involved in?
AI wouldn’t call it an innovation as much as an applica- tion. I spent 11 years working for a Toyota Group
company called Denso, which is a $40 billion parts manufacturer, and really mastered the Toyota production system—Lean—while I was there. I have since applied those
lean processes to the supply chain. What I have done is
focus on ways to identify and eliminate inefficiencies in the
supply chain. I have applied those throughout my career in
companies that I have gone to work for.
QWhat do you consider to be your greatest personal and professional accomplishments in the field to
date?
AI could say my greatest personal accomplishment was at Denso. I went from basically a lower management
level to the first vice president of operations. I was the high-est-ranked non-Japanese in Denso for North America.
[As for] a professional accomplishment, I would say it
was turning around Formica. I was brought in by an equity
group as part of a turnaround team. My role was really to
integrate the logistics activities within that
company. It was a horrible union environment, where they had lost all trust in management. Also, they did everything they
could to sabotage the efforts that management was making. The company had lost
tremendous market share as a result of having just stopped paying attention to detail.
So I applied what I call the Toyota culture, developing trust with the unions,
showing them that I understood their business and understood what their jobs were.
In the meantime, I started pulling the various operations together. Within two years,
we were able to dramatically shorten our order to delivery
cycle time. We had a culture that was much improved, and
we were able to sell the company. Unfortunately, the new
owners went into bankruptcy, but that’s a different story.
QYou are now at Lehigh University. How can industry and universities work together better to advance the
supply chain profession?
ANot enough universities focus on outreach to industry or have research centers like we have at Lehigh that are
intended to work with industry to identify needs and solve
supply chain problems. I learned a long time ago that a university is just like a manufacturing company. If you manufacture something, you have to manufacture something for
which there is demand in the marketplace, right?
As an industry research center, we can determine what
industry needs so we can go back and say these are the skill
sets that we need to incorporate into our program to align
