Rob Handfield

Dr. Rob Handfield Dr. Rob Handfield is the Bank of America Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management at NC State University since 1999. From 1992-1998, he was a member of the Purchasing and Operations Management Faculty at Michigan State University where he also served as the Faculty Research Associate in the Global Procurement and Supply Chain Benchmarking Initiative. Professor Handfield is the founder and Director of the Supply Chain Resource Consortium (SCRC) at NC State University. The SCRC is an initiative dedicated to advancing excellence in the area of supply chain management and currently includes 12 corporate members. As director of the SCRC, Dr. Handfield leverages his extensive industry knowledge and consults with executives in the US and across the world to identify key supply chain issues and trends on the horizon. He serves as the spokesperson for the SCRC and NC State University and provides visibility to the effort in the industrial community. Along with the managing director, he is also involved in setting the strategic direction for the SCRC. Dr. Handfield’s current research focuses on global supplier development, global logistics, negotiation and relationship management, environmentally-responsible manufacturing, and buyer-supplier alliances and trust development. In a recent book titled Supply Chain Redesign, which Dr. Handfield co-authored with Ernest Nichols, he explores the transformation that companies’ supply chains are going through and presents strategies to integrate participants through shared planning systems, shared information systems and improved communication and alignment of business goals. Dr. Handfield has co-authored three other books on strategic sourcing and supply chain management including Introduction to Supply Chain Management, Purchasing and Supply Chain Management and Supplier Integration in New Product Development. His research has been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals such as the Sloan Management Review, Supply Chain Management Review, California Management Review, Journal of Operations Management, Decision Science, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and IEEE Transactions in Engineering Management. Dr. Handfield has extensive consulting experience with a number of global organizations, including Milliken & Company, Cabot Microelectronics, General Motors, Federal Express, Reliant Energy, Vitro Corporativo, Colgate Palmolive, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Steelcase, Johnson Controls Inc., Turkish Petroleum, NSK Corporation, Union Pacific, and Mead Corporation. He has developed and delivered executive training programs for many of these firms as well as professional groups such as NAPM. He is Editor of the Journal of Operations Management, Area Editor of Supply Chain Management for Decision Sciences, and writes a column on Supply Chain Management in APICS: The Performance Advantage. In May 2001, Dr. Handfield was awarded the Henry Latane Distinguished PhD Alumni Award from the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned his PhD in Operations from UNC at Chapel Hill in 1990 and a Bachelor of Science in applied mathematics and statistics in 1985 from the University of British Columbia. While an undergraduate, he ran a construction contracting business for three years.