Articles

Case Studies

John Rickard: Logistics With a Human Touch

Try this logistics experiment: Drop packages of food from a helicopter onto a field filled with football and rugby players and see if anyone gets hurt. That’s the exercise John Rickard and his associates at the relief agency International Rescue Committee (IRC) conducted in 1999 while laying plans for a humanitarian mission in the mountains […]

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Debbie E. Jackson: Life at the End of the ERP Tunnel

Debbie Jackson is starting to get her life back. It has been on hold since late 2003, while she and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins University endured one of the truly harrowing ordeals of business life: a major ERP implementation. As supply chain procurement team lead for HopkinsOne—the initiative to move all the Johns Hopkins […]

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Brent Shinall: Bursting with Energy

When Brent Shinall grew bored with his job as manufacturing engineer for hypersonic engine maker Pratt & Whitney, he started exploring new career opportunities. “I saw people in the purchasing department working with suppliers and negotiating contracts, and thought, ‘That looks like more fun,’” he recalls. So when the company’s purchasing manager needed an engineer […]

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IT Cleanup, Aisle 3

Migrating to a single technology platform and translating SAP transactions onto handheld terminals were high on Wawa’s IT shopping list. It checked off both with SAP.

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Ivan Figueroa: A Man Who Plays Many Parts

Ivan Figueroa leads a double life. As global logistics manager for Radiant Systems in Alpharetta, Ga., he keeps distribution centers throughout the world supplied with spare parts for his company’s point-of-sale systems. In his other role as council member of the newly formed city of Johns Creek, Ga., he wrestles with zoning and planning questions […]

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Michael Mahon: Rolling in Dough

When the music store he managed went out of business, Denver jazz bassist Mike Mahon needed a new day job. He found one driving a delivery truck for Otis Spunkmeyer, a manufacturer and distributor of frozen cookie dough and ready-made bakery products. Soon, Mahon spotted an opportunity that looked too good to pass up. Otis […]

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Mark Smith: Remaking SC Strategy, Again

It is amazing how much can change in a mere 18 months. When Mark Smith left his job as head of operations for GTSI in early 2005, the company focused mainly on reselling information technology products—such as notebook computers and software packages—to government organizations. But in September 2006, when Smith returned to the Chantilly, Va.-based […]

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