Dr. Craig Voortman
South Africa

Dr Craig Voortman is the Logistics & Supply Chain Research Scientist with the Royal Commission Yanbu in Saudi Arabia. His primary focus in coming to Saudi Arabia is to envision & establish from scratch the brand new Saudi National Center of Excellence in Supply Chain and Logistics. This new Center aims to ultimately become one of the best training, education and research centers in Saudi Arabia & ME in the logistics, supply chain, transport, procurement, port operations & shipping fields. He formerly served as Head of Department & Co-Head of the Department of Transportation and Supply Chain Management at the Faculty of Management at the University of Johannesburg. The programs he managed grew from under 100 students in the purchasing/ supply chain/ logistics/ transport fields to over 1200 students during the 15-year period in which he was Programme Manager/ Head of Department, and Co-Head of Department. This university logistics department is now the largest of its kind in the world & services over 5000 students from Diplomas through to Doctorate degrees.

Dr Craig is a seasoned international consultant & trainer with global experience in the specialised fields of logistics, supply chain, procurement & project management & consulting to over 50 companies. He has provided high-impact training to over 10 000 people in North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East & Far East over the last 20 years – all the way through from entry-level to top-level executives. Companies trained/consulted include the Virgin Group, Mobily, NCB & SABIC (Saudi), MST (Azerbaijan), Kaefer Insulation (German), TDK Epcos (Zhuhai, China), Terrapinn (UK, Dubai & Singapore), Clariden Global (Singapore), Barloworld Logistics, UTi, Astra Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, Dimension Data, Unitrans, Leoron, LBT, IMM, IDC, TWR, Greyhound Bus, Lyceum Bus College, Al Indigo, National Microfinance Bank Tanzania (NMB), Mozambican Transport, Transnet Pipelines, Imperial Logistics, Nampak Packaging, Nedbank, Frito Lays, Gauteng Dept Roads, Steinhoff, Sealy Posturpedic, Panalpina Group, Grinaker Engineering & Construction, Albany Bakeries, Tiger Brands, Sun Couriers, Saudi Parsons, Al Ain Zoo (UAE), Petronet & the Cape Town Ports Authority. His globe-trotting has taken him to approximately 30 nations & over 50 production plants worldwide. Dr Craig has a great sense of humour & his exposure to a wide variety of cultures worldwide has enriched him with the cultural sensitivity to add value to companies & people in different nations & settings.

He has spoken at over 30 international & national conferences on a wide variety of topics & has won several best speaker awards. He has published several books & articles including “Global Logistics Management”, an easy-to-understand read in logistics, “Enter the Dragon: How Why, When China will Rule the World in the 21st Century” & was a contributing author to “Strategic Logistics Management”. He holds 6 qualifications in different fields including an MBA (Wales), MA (Cum Laude) & DPhil (Univ. of Johannesburg). Dr Craig is also an entrepreneur & businessman who has successfully established Voortman Cookies (www.voortman.com) as a brand of international repute in the Southern African marketplace & still serves as Managing Agent for Voortman Cookies Ltd in Southern Africa. He no longer handles the nuts & bolts of transport, warehousing, marketing & promotion as he used to do, & the full scale of activities are now performed in their entirety by strategic partners who he worked with and established from the early days of distribution. Dr Voortman is also Director of Procurement & Supply Chain Practice for the international body IABFM.