Presidents Message

Hello to all of the PRSJ members! What a year we are having!

It is now May and we are starting to wind down our indoor activities in favor of spending more time outside. The 2007-2008 season has been productive. We have had seven Professional Development (PDM) meetings with excellent speakers and we will be closing out the year with two more super speakers.

Tim Rody gave an outstanding presentation (Data Integration - Making Your Data Work for Transportation and Logistics) at our April PDM. The focus was on real life cases centering on communication disconnects that caused delays, mistaken shipments, and wasted time in general. Much of problem was attributed to part numbers changing as the materials were transferred from one system to another. Some of the situations were amusing to listen to but, as I’m many of us can testify to, were not so humorous while they were happening to us and customers were starting to wonder if we or our companies knew what we were doing. Tim’s presentation was informative, entertaining and we appreciate the time he took to put it together.

We have Dave Hollinger as the guest speaker for May’s PDM. The title is “Lean Business Concepts”. Dave has been in this field for years and is quite accomplished in helping businesses cut waste out of their systems and operations in much of the same way Taiichi Ohno insisted on cutting waste out of Toyota’s manufacturing systems. In fact, part of the presentation will be focusing on the Toyota’s 7 wastes. I expect this presentation to be every bit as good and informative as Dave’s previous talks, so don’t miss this meeting at the Cranbury Inn on May 21st if you are interested in lean methodology to eliminate waste.

For our Top Management Night on June 18th , we will have Ted Lithgow, Ph.D. from Schering-Plough as our guest speaker. Dr. Lithgow, a Group Vice President and General Manager of Merck & Schering-Plough Respiratory Joint Venture Global Prescription Business, will present on managing a business formed by two companies where large sums of money are involved and building team work with representatives from various groups within each parent corporation is imperative. I’m really looking forward to this one because sometimes it is difficult to get consensus from different groups just within our own companies. This will be something that all of us should attend and will probably bring home something that would help us in our dealings with team members.


We also have our education courses coming up for certification preparation:

"Detailed Planning and Scheduling" for CPIM certification, at East Windsor, Shiseido America, Inc., 9 Weeks on Thursdays ----- beginning July 10th, 6:30 pm

“CPIM: Basics of Supply Chain Management” at Mount Laurel, NJ (Okidata): (start TBD)

So be sure to join us this month and next month to close out our 2007-2008 season. We look forward seeing all of you!

George Lazarides, CPIM
President, Princeton South Jersey Chapter