Rob is one of the true experts in channel dynamics and process reengineering. His client consulting experience includes projects in market strategy, product and service pricing, purchasing strategy, organization structure redefinition, cost identification and containment, and productivity improvement. He has assisted companies in bringing a fundamental rethinking and radical redesign to their business processes achieving dramatic improvements in cost, service, quality and speed.
Rob’s thinking on strategic relationships among channel members is featured in an article published in BUSINESS HORIZONS magazine, The Emerging Approach to Business Strategy: Building a Relationship Advantage. Rob has leveraged his consulting experience in channel dynamics and strategic alliances to contribute significantly to a path-breaking study by the Health Industry Distributors Association entitled Stockless Materials Management -- How It Fits Into The Healthcare Puzzle. Rob has also drawn on his experience to author or contribute significantly to a number of other publications.
During Rob's twenty-five years of consulting he has pioneered the development of practical frameworks for companies to solve business problems. For example, one of these is used to understand the true costs of products, the nature of the activities delivering those products, and how those activities may be streamlined, focused or eliminated. Another framework helps companies link specific customer wants to the activities performed by the companies, allowing them to more precisely identify value and non-value added activities.
Prior to 1991, Rob was a partner in Arthur Andersen & Co. He held a number of leadership positions within the Business Consulting practice. Rob’s client base spanned a wide range of industries to include: distribution, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, assembly and technology. His innovative approaches to solving client challenges were used as the bases for a number of firm-wide initiatives such as activity based costing, customer focused activity analysis, and supply chain management.
Dr. Alan Parker has extensive experience working with and consulting Fortune 1000 companies on the implementation of web, data mining and knowledge solutions. Dr. Parker’s work is profiled in the top selling data mining book Data Mining Techniques: For Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support.
He has authored several books and over fifty journal articles and technical reports. Dr. Parker earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University (1/84); MS in Electrical Engineering (6/81) and BS in Applied Mathematics from Georgia Institute of Technology (12/80).
At IBM, Dr. Parker served in the Advanced System Architecture department where he was responsible for the authorship of registered IBM documents on I/O architectures, which specified a common architecture for seven different IBM platforms.
Dr. Parker is the author of Algorithms and Data Structures in C++, which has been integrated into the courseware at Princeton University as well as Introduction to Microprogramming, published by Texas Instruments in English and Japanese.
Dr. Parker consulted with Time, Inc. to analyze and improve their production process by identifying causes of waste. As one of the largest data mining engagements to date, this process is described in the text Mastering Data Mining: The Art and Science of Customer Relationship Management.
Dr. Parker has performed data mining engagements across diverse verticals including financial, health, hospitality, insurance, production, retail, telecom and travel.