Contact Details

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Position

Senior Industrial Fellow

Affiliation

Dr Derek Ford

Background

Dr Derek Ford has spent over 25 years in manufacturing management before joining the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) in 2001. His industrial experience includes; senior operational and logistics positions in multinationals as well as small and medium-sized manufacturing companies; capital goods, batch, jobbing and process manufacturing; system implementation, process improvement and World-class manufacturing.

Derek leads a team that is responsible for developing innovative services to support small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMM) in the Eastern region. This has led to many successful interventions that have brought about significant improvements to the businesses involved and raised the profile of the IfM. Derek has been instrumental in developing a diagnostic and action-planning tool that the IfM can use to identify the business drivers and constraints in small and medium-sized manufacturing companies.

Derek has a particular interest in manufacturing planning and control systems including manual methods as well as being a seasoned practitioner with MRP, MRP II and ERP, its specification, implementation and its successful deployment and founded the IfM's Manufacturing Planning and Control special interest group for SMMs.

Derek has published various papers on manufacturing planning and control, supplier selection, and diagnostic and action planning tools.

Dr Ford has a BA (Hons) in Modern History, an MA in Contemporary European History, an MSt in Manufacturing from Wolfson College, University of Cambridge a PhD in Manufacturing Systems from Cranfield University and a P.G. Cert in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.