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Supply Chain Management

Tom Linton About the Physics of Supply Chain and Paths to Become CPO

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Tom Linton, chief procurement and supply chain officer for Flex Ltd., recently sat down with Poole College’s Rob Handfield, executive director of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative and professor of operations and supply chain management, to tackle burning supply chain topics as well as his professional endeavours. 

Linton applies his previous experience working with sourcing for IBM and LG to Flex Ltd.’s current project, Flex Pulse, a product that focuses on the real-time visibility of supply chains to find problem areas. 

“We wanted to create a pulse center where we were monitoring things by exception, not monitoring everything that was going well,” said Linton. “Ninety-eight percent of a supply chain is running well and what I really wanted to focus on was the 2 percent that wasn’t running well and broke down into digestible, understandable information.”

Linton covers not only lessons learned in his career but gives insight on how the laws of physics apply to supply chain, implications of localized supply chains and advice for recent graduates entering the workforce.