William Crane
William Crane is the CEO of IndustryStar, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based supply chain software and services technology company that empowers leaders with greater supply chain agility and company profitability. William is a trusted advisor in supply chain with demonstrated results starting, launching and enhancing procurement, supplier quality, materials, logistics and manufacturing organizations.
His work has appeared frequently in the Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM), Institute for Supply Management (ISM), Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) and Sourcing Industry Group (SIG), among others. William’s passion for bringing technologies to market that have a positive impact on the world can be found via his blog Supply Chain for Tomorrow’s Technology.
William is also Host of the Supply Chain Innovation podcast where he interviews top industry change-makers to uncover strategies, tactics, and tools to expedite, optimize, and de-risk supply chain operations.
From this author
As Peter Drucker famously said, “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.” Today, technology tools enable real-time collection and analysis of near endless amounts of big data throughout the value chain. This, coupled with our exponentially growing data, offers an exciting new frontier for which the supply chain is uniquely positioned to unlock hidden waste.
Our technology-enabled productivity push is poised to reduce costs, improve quality and compress...
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in the required virtual supply chain work across companies. Aside from the pandemic, teams workingvirtually is a macro trend that newer generations making up a growing portion of the workforce expect. Looking ahead, if supply chain leaders want to attract and retain the best and brightest talent, they will need to facilitate work in new and different ways.
One...
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and 2020 recession are creating new stresses and disruptions in the global supply chain that are now presenting themselves. In today‘s hyperconnected economies, the response to supply chain risk has primarily been “reactive”. Traditional, “cost down” sourcing efforts often amplify and expedite supply chain risk (e.g., moving contracts from a troubled supplier, delaying supplier payments, competitive bidding, etc.) Existing...
Launching an all new product ahead of your competition can determine long term market share and resulting profitability. Sourcing professionals have an amazing opportunity to increase the pace at which their companies bring new products to market by condensing the source-to-pay (S2P) process.
In the previous article, we discussed how...
Let’s face it — many of our company’s functions still operate largely in silos as we batch our work together to then throw it over the wall to the next team in the value chain. Much lip service has been dedicated to catchy buzzwords like “agile” and “collaborative new product development.” Unfortunately, these newer ways of working together remain largely untapped.
As sourcing professionals, this leaves us to receive a flood of drawings from...
