Josef Packowski

Dr. Josef Packowski is co-founder and CEO of the CAMELOT Consulting Group. An international organization of leading specialists focused on Value Chain Management in core industries comprising chemical, pharmaceutical, and consumer goods manufacturers. He received his doctoral degree in business and information technology from Saarland University, and in addition to his professional work he is today a lecturer on advanced planning systems and supply chain management at the University of Mannheim, one of the leading business schools in Germany. He now actively supports the University in the form of an additional CAMELOT-endowed professorship for SCM, helping to establish a think-tank for modern SCM studies.

Dr. Packowski is a respected industry consultant with over 25 years of experience, and a visionary leader in operations management and strategy in process industries. During this time he has worked for several of CAMELOT's most prominent clients and global industry leaders such as Astellas, AstraZeneca, Bayer, BASF, DSM, Henkel, Lyondell Basell, Merck, Novartis, Roche, Sabic, and others.

However, he has dedicated most of his professional life to advising those companies on how to operate and work more effectively in SCM. Indeed, from the beginning of his academic and professional career Dr. Packowski has consistently maintained scholarly and professional interest in production and supply chain planning. Starting in the late 1980s, he was privileged to support manufacturing teams in achieving "Class A" certification in MRP II and Sales & Operations Planning, in one of the first initiatives of that kind in the UK. This was followed by an intensive engagement in an EU-funded research program focusing on the development of ERP-based "Production Planning for the Process Industry", resulting in the SAP R/3 PP-PI application offered by SAP AG in the early 1990s.

Dr. Packowski's subsequent PhD. work, applying theoretical operations research methods in planning for process manufacturers was more about the new "Advanced Planning" concepts that seemed to offer solutions for coping more effectively with typical planning issues in process industries, issues that ERP platforms had failed to solve and which he was experiencing in practice during his parallel consultancy work. Consequently, this brought him in the late 1990s into implementation projects and a close collaboration within his own CAMELOT consulting organization with Tom Baker, a pioneer in the area of Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) technology. Tom's mission statement, "Bring us the planning problem, we will solve it", was very motivating for him, but also raised the bar high. He experienced this challenge in the beginning of the year 2000, when they began implementing the new SAP SCM/APO planning applications with CAMELOT teams for the very first time in pharmaceutical and chemical companies. Today they can look back on more than 100 successful implementation and transformation projects in the industry around the globe.

During his professional career, Dr. Packowski had the opportunity to apply two major technology-driven SCM paradigms for their respective times: the MRP/ERP-based and the SCM/APS-based planning paradigms. In contrast to other business-related technology, the business-driven SCM paradigms have been changing much more frequently in all those years. Depending on the economic up or downs of the time and the accompanying business objectives, he has had to emphasize either the lean or the agile SCM paradigm. Today, all these concepts and associated tools are well known and applied in the industry.