Category: Blog

One of my teaching tasks is the mentoring of small businesses here in the Portland metro area. Since I am “the Cash Man” the university has decided that I should guide local craft brewers in improving their cash flows. This is a fun assignment, but one thing I’ve now seen […]

Over the last six months I’ve written extensively about People and Processes, but little on tools. I believe that people are overly reliant on what they think to be the silver bullet of technology, but spend too little time on truly understanding their corporate culture and processes. This is a […]

Quality is a critical component of any manufacturing or service-related business: it has become the hallmark of most companies around the world. This emphasis got its start back in the 1920s, when S. Toyoda first invented an automated loom that stopped operations whenever a thread broke. It has now become […]

After I decided to leave the corporate world three summers ago, I started consulting with some colleagues in British Columbia. Our client was a mid-sized manufacturer of vitamins and supplements. The owner prided himself on adhering to GMP (or Pharmaceutical standards) in his procurement, storage, quality, manufacturing and distribution processes. […]

In the past three months I’ve become acquainted with something new to me – Public Private Partnerships. Many of us have pondered what we ourselves can do to get our regions moving and working again, and what I’ve found is that it really is possible to do so. The issue […]

This week, I gave my students their final exam for Intro to Supply Chain. One of my colleagues, Daniel Wong, taught me to create multiple tests, so I developed three different exams. As I composed questions that covered all areas of the supply chain, I wondered just how many of […]