2023 NESCON Supply Chain Hall of Fame Winner
William H. Pike Jr. is the 2023 New England Supply Chain Conference Hall of Fame Award winner.
William Pike has been a long-standing volunteer within the supply chain community, helping numerous practitioners over the decades. He joined APICS Chapter #1 in 1978, at a time when most of the original Chapter #1 founding members were still involved. Every three months there would be a Region 1 meeting somewhere in New England, where all the chapters would get together to share ideas and methods of how to run a successful chapter. This was also a time to make lifetime friends with those who had a thirst for knowledge, and the desire to learn how to do things better and more efficiently in the supply chain.
In the next evolution of his volunteering, Bill was part of a group of member volunteers who got together and formed a committee to run a seminar, which came to be known as Seminar 1. It was very successful and returned money to the chapters, which was badly needed at the time, to help create lower-cost educational programs for new supply chain practitioners, to help further advance the supply chain profession.
Bill volunteered to serve in multiple positions within Chapter #1, right from the very time he joined as a member, as his manager was very involved in APICS, encouraging continuous education and continuous improvement within the supply chain. The company he worked at (Teledyne Rodney Metals), had six members who eventually all served as Presidents of Chapter 1. Sadly, Bill was the last President of Chapter 1, and he was also the last President of the South Shore Chapter. When he closed the New Bedford APICS chapter, he sent the APICS national office (now ASCM) the Chapter #1 flag, as well as the history of the chapter, as written by Al Sylvia (this history is also posted on the Massachusetts Minuteman chapter here).
Bill also served as an instructor for multiple CPIM courses over the years, and learned how true the code of “TO TEACH, IS TO LEARN TWICE” really is. He also learned that some students thought that if they simply attended the course, they would be able to pass the certification exam at the end, without putting any effort in on their own. So he always told his classes (during the very first session), that what he was teaching was the outline, and if they wanted to pass the exam, they had to read and study all the available material (and after that, the percentage of his students that passed the Certification exams increased dramatically).
Regarding CPIM exam content, Bill would attend seminars put on by the independent organization that used to give and grade these exams. In these seminars, they would be tasked to make up exam questions. The process would be this: You had to have one correct answer and three almost correct answers, and you had to document where in the book or material you got the question and answer from. As an example, in two days they came up with 40 questions and answers, of which many of them would eventually show up on the final exam.
Bill is retired now, and still keeps in contact with his APICS/ASCM friends, and attends the virtual PDM meetings on Zoom, as well as any in-person chapter dinner meetings being held. His key piece of advice is, “listen to any and every educational speaker that you can, attending lectures either in person or on Zoom, volunteer with your local chapter, and never stop learning and improving the supply chain for the next generation of practitioners…and continue to be kind to each other.”
His many years of service as a volunteer and instructor in the field of supply chain earn William H. Pike Jr. the 13th chair in NESCON’s (New England Supply Chain) Hall of Fame.