James B. Rice, Jr.

James Rice, Jr. joined MIT in 1995 as the Director of the MIT Integrated Supply Chain Management (ISCM) Program, a collaborative research program with industry partners. As Director of the ISCM Program, he serves sponsoring companies by conducting research in supply chain management, facilitating collaboration among the sponsors at quarterly best practice sharing events, and funding supply chain research across MIT. Rice currently teaches the "Supply Chain Context" course in MIT's Master of Engineering in Logistics academic program. Rice's research has been focused on supply chain management, particularly organizational aspects within the firm.

Currently, Jim's research is focused on two areas: (1) Understanding the impact of the Internet on the supply chain, and (2) Supply chain process redesign using the Process Handbook (PH) knowledge repository and redesign tool. The PH was developed by the MIT Center for Coordination Science. Some of Rice's work studying supply chain organizations has been published in a recent book Surviving Supply Chain Integration-Strategies for Small Manufacturers published by the National Academy Press, March 2000 as well as an article entitled "Spanning the Functional Boundaries Through Horizontal Process Management (HPM)" which was published in Supply Chain Management Review, Fall 1997.

In addition to his role at MIT, Rice serves on the Board of several organizations: National Research Council's Board on Manfacturing and Engineering Design (BMAED), serving through 2002; Chairman of the US Air Force Logistics Transformation Advisory Board; the International Advisory Board for the KLICT Research Initiative sponsored by a Ministry of the government of The Netherlands; Editorial Board for Supply Chain Management Review; Board of Advisors for @SourceNet, and Vice President-Treasurer for the Board of the New England Roundtable of the Council of Logistics Management (CLM).

Prior to joining MIT, Mr. Rice managed manufacturing and distribution operations at Procter & Gamble, and served as a sales and market manager at General Electric Company. He earned his MBA in operations and finance from the Harvard Business School, and a Bachelors Degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.