Preston Blevins is a practitioner, consultant, and project manager with a combined experience of over forty years. He has certifications from APICS, the respected supply-chain and operations management association, as a Certified Fellow Production and Inventory Management (CFPIM), Certified in Integrated Resource Management (CIRM), and Certified Supply Chain Professional (CSCP). During his career, he has provided guidance to manufacturers on leveraging information technology to improve productivity, reduce inventory investment, and get in alignment with customer needs. Another career thread is workforce development, and a commitment to the Lean Management System. Preston lived and worked seven years in offshore assignments in the UK, Scandinavia, and Europe. In addition to those offshore assignments, he has collaborated extensively with co-workers in Japan, the People‘s Republic of China, and India.He has managed major multi-year projects such as: new business unit start-up, business unit turn-around, global account management, consulting practice start-up, new product launch, ERP implementations, and Y2K.One of the industries he specialized in serving are those producing complex, highly engineered devices that require both extensive pre-manufacturing, and post-production engineering services.In the last decade, he has focused on organizations that manufacture recipe/formula-based products such as food, nutritional supplements, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and specialty chemicals. All of these industries are working with challenging regulatory compliance requirements, ever increasing global competition, and environmental sustainability requirements.Preston has authored over thirty professional association conference white papers, numerous magazine articles, and authored a book chapter for a best practices compilation for the cosmetics industry. Topics covered include advanced
