From the supply chain front lines to the classroom

Practical and academic insights into global supply chain challenges and solutions from an executive-turned-professor

This interview with Professor Gregory Collins, MBA, Arizona State University is a dive into the world of supply chain management from both a business and classroom perspective. Conducted in May 2025 at the EDS Summit, this discussion illuminates both the academic and practical facets of the field. Professor Collins shares insights into the curriculum at ASU, the diverse career paths available to supply chain professionals and the evolving landscape of global trade. From his early career in China to his current role, he offers a unique perspective on the complexities and opportunities within the supply chain industry.

Q: Tell us a little bit about the supply chain department and curriculum at Arizona State University.

A: In our department, about half of the professors are career research professors who have their Ph.D., and focus on some specific area of the supply chain to research. The other half of us are typically former executives that teach students how to apply knowledge, whether it’s procurement logistics, how to model it, etc. So, I’m a professional professor-type in the classes that I teach in the undergraduate level. I also teach senior level classes, including the capstone course on supply chain strategy, as well as a course on global supply chain management and you can imagine how fun that class was this year, with the tariffs. We did a lot of modeling — e.g., what would be the impact to a company’s financials and their cash-to-cash conversion be, if these components had a different level of tariffs? There’s a number of different analytical case studies, but the conversations are just so great with the students. The seniors are very engaged and usually excellent students.

Q: How long have you been in the business and what is a bit of your background?

A: I just completed my seventh year teaching at ASU. I received my MBA and moved to China in 1982. I then went to work for Microsoft. We built up the Xbox supply chain. It was around that time that China was really sort of developing policy and changing things with free trade zones. I then started a company in private equity consulting. Banks and private equity were starting to think, how do we build these low-cost supply chains? We were starting to understand it. We were doing acquisitions and mergers, consolidating industries, using a large economy’s scale and low-cost premium model that you see everywhere now 30 years later, especially in the electronics industry, as well as industrial products, apparel, toys, shoelaces, everything. It all happened very quickly and it was interesting being there. I was a kid in a candy store and didn’t know what I would be doing the next day. Government and policy changes for imports made it interesting as well, and a learning experience. I lived on planes and in airports for about 10 years, and every time I’d come back to the U.S., I would often end up teaching executive MBA classes or guest teaching in a class for a few weeks at a time. The dean at W.P. Carey School of Business eventually asked me to come on as a professor and that’s how I ended up here.

Q: How does the supply chain program at ASU provide internship and career opportunities or students?

A: Our department at ASU hosts two career fairs every year, and it’s run by the faculty advisor for the Supply Chain Management Association, which is a student-led organization. In the fall, they have around 90 companies that come in to recruit students for internships and for full-time employment, and then we have another career fair in the spring. We have a lot of electronics and computer companies that recruit at these fairs. Many of our graduates go to places like Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks. A lot of our graduates stay in the Southwest, Texas, Arizona or West Coast, from Washington through Silicon Valley.

Q: In a broader sense, what are supply chain experts and researchers studying and focusing on right now?

A: Coming out of COVID and the resulting shortages, coupled with the geopolitical issues that have been going on since 2008, we are now in an age of “slo-bilization.” The financial crisis in 2008 made companies start to look at how to descale and how to model risk and adopt policies like “China plus 1,” which means moving some manufacturing to Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, etc., in addition to China. This has resulted in a much more regionalized trade flow, rather than a completely free trade world. You are seeing more bilateral-type trade agreements that are changing the trade flows of products. This impacts supply chains upstream and downstream, and companies are really having to invest in supply chain strategy experts to focus on this.

Q: Outsourcing was the battle cry 20 years ago, and now the battle cry seems to be reshoring and moving manufacturing back to the U.S. How easy or difficult would this be?

A: In terms of moving supply chains away from China or back to the U.S., China in general has always been used to getting business. Are they really going to say, “Oh yeah, no problem, we want to lose all this revenue and we’re going to help you move to Vietnam or India?” And these second and third tier supply chains and ecosystems are very difficult to replicate anywhere else. Financial pundits and politicians and others often don’t understand the complexity of these situations. Reshoring or nearshoring sounds convenient, but it takes years to build supply chains and it’s very difficult to just turn on a switch and move them. There’s also the issue of talent. Where is your talent and your workforce? The Wall Street Journal recently reported there’s a halfmillion manufacturing jobs in the U.S. that are unfilled. It’s very difficult to recruit people, especially skilled labor. It’s also worth mentioning that in 2024, only 8 percent of the GDP of the U.S. was manufacturing. We are a heavily service-oriented economy.

Q: How did the CHIPS Act make it easier or harder to fix or strengthen supply chains?

A: At Intel, right down the street from ASU, they do the fabrication work. But the average semiconductor, especially microprocessors, travel roughly 55 million kilometers around the world before it gets back into the hands of consumers because it needs to complete all these different steps in all of those areas. I was in Panama last summer and was invited to this government meeting where they talked about the CHIPS Act and money that flowed to Costa Rica and Panama for semiconductor manufacturing. One of the very difficult things in the process is the assembly and test. After you complete the fabrication of the semiconductor, it may travel to a low-cost region with lower-cost labor and then after that, it might go to Germany to be built into a specific module before it ends up coming back to the U.S. It involves a lot of skilled labor and moving all of that to the U.S. is almost like moving shoelace manufacturing — it’s very difficult.

Q: What are some best practices for building a more resilient and agile electronics component supply, in your view?

A: I’d say building better predictive analytics and integrated data systems. I’d say about half of my students are also studying business data and analytics, along with supply chain management. Many companies still have regionalized data in procurement or logistics. Having a more integrated system would allow for companies to use more predictive measures and have endto- end visibility, allowing them to answer questions like, where do we keep our buffer inventory and what is really the risk of something happening? This helps build resilience. The goal is always to reduce uncertainty and reduce risk. Supply chains are like living ecosystems, where if one part changes, it will cause a change or response from the other parts.

Q: What do you think are the critical skills needed in your student body for their future in supply chain careers?

A: I would say emerging technologies like predictive planning technologies that have more scenario analysis built into it. AI is great but it has to be trained over time and you have to feed the AI tool a large body of data before it will be useful. And of course, there’s the obvious desire to automate standardized processes like procurement, and that’s nothing new.

Q: Do you see any return to total cost of ownership and the Deming Quality Initiative versus purchase price variance, a.k.a focusing on the lowest price?

A: A lot of times companies will say, here are my suppliers and here are my components and do I make these for the lowest cost per unit with my suppliers? If they add competition in, they could get an even lower cost and more profit. That is purchase price variance. That is versus saying, let’s look at the total cost of ownership of the whole supply chain and optimize the cost of a whole supply chain, not just one piece. Take Walmart, for example. The Walmart CEO just came out and said with the new tariffs coming in, they are not going to raise prices on everything, but perhaps some things. So they are looking at it from an overall cost perspective, rather than going pound for pound on each individual item. Everybody wants a return to total cost of ownership, especially CEOs and CFOs. But if I’m a frontline purchasing manager, how do I make a name for myself and how do I get my personal bonus? I get the best purchase price variance from my suppliers and then I’m a hero because I’ve saved the company a lot of money on this one part.

Professor Gregory Collins, MBA, has taught in the undergraduate, MBA and executive programs at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University for seven years as a professor of global supply chain and operations strategy. Collins is founder and chief supply chain officer of The Lakeline Group, the Shanghai- based firm specializing in reshoring and nearshoring, private equity investment and consulting. He has held C-suite supply chain positions with Flextronics and Gerber and lived in China for many years. Collins was awarded the Key of Shanghai and the 2008 Beijing Olympics Award, and was honored in the Great Hall of the People by Chinese President Hu Jin Tao in 2004.