Bob Liu

Bob Liu, C.P.M., is the Founder of Supply Chain Management Forum (www.scm-blog.com) and Managing Director of CSCS International.

Bob has been a supply chain professional for over 10 years, and spent the majority of his professional life in Silicon Valley, CA. He first developed suppliers globally for a $3B semiconductor company to source components, technologies and services. Then he took charge of inventory planning to support this company’s $400M spare parts business. With a team of 14 planners in Asia, Europe and North America, Bob Liu supported major customers included IBM, Micron, AMD, Intel, Samsung, Hynix, Toshiba and TSMC. Prior to coming to the U.S. in 2000, Bob was in Shanghai, China helping multinationals penetrate into China's booming construction market.

Bob is an accomplished writer and a frequent speaker on purchasing and supply chain issues. He has contributed frequently to Supply Chain Management Review, Logistics Management and Global Sources. In 2012, Bob published his first book Purchasing and Supply Chain Management: A Practitioner’s Perspective. In a few weeks after publication, it became the No. 1 bestselling book in operations management at dangdang.com.

Educated as an engineer and a project manager in China, Bob got his MBA in supply chain management at Arizona State University. While attending ASU, he worked part time at CAPS Research and established relationships with Institute for Supply Management (ISM). As a liaison between ISM and their counterpart China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing(CFLP), Bob helped bridge two organizations on professional certification. Bob is a Certified Purchasing Manager (C.P.M.) by ISM. He also went through the rigorous training by ASU, Motorola and Honeywell, and became a Six Sigma Black Belt.