Food Safety Regulatory Compliance: Catalyst for a Lean and Sustainable Food Supply Chain (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781439849569)

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 master scheduling techniques, Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP), the Lean Management System, managing cultural differences, project-oriented manufacturing, planning and controlling service delivery, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Batch-Process ERP, leveraging food safety regulatory requirements into operational excellence, the need to manage blue (fresh) water in a sustainable manner. He is also a sector author for the APICS Operations Management Body of Knowledge (OMBOK) framework, the definitive text on operations management. Preston is also an active public speaker, and occasional university guest speaker.

He has held many different volunteer executive roles over the last thirty years with APICS, most recently serving on the association's Board of Directors (BOD) and has been a member with ASQ (American Society for Quality), AME (Association for Manufacturing Excellence), PMI (Project Management Institute), and IFT (Institute of Food Technologists).