Meet Bill Leber
In his role as Business Development Manager for Swisslog, Bill Leber is responsible for driving the company's value added solutions to warehouse and distribution system design and automation in the North American market. Bill is an accomplished commercial manager with a proven track record in marketing, sales and new business development delivering a sustainable, positive bottom line. He also has extensive hands-on experience in the development and execution of market plans and comprehensive customer proposals.
Having read the Wall Street Journal article titled, "Companies More Prone to Go Vertical," as well as Logipi's follow-up blog titled, "Vertical Integration -- Oracle, Pepsi, Apple, GM and others are going back to the future," Bill Leber, a business development manager with Swisslog, graciously accepted an invitation from Logipi to share his thoughts on the topic.
From Bill's perspective, last year's mantra was "hunker down and preserve cash." If you look at 2009, he says, it was a really bad year for all industries that require any sort of major capital outlay., M & A activity, which is typically a driving force in distribution system investment, was also relatively quiet. Companies haven't done a lot of aggressive expansion, he added, which has left many with cash on their balance sheets, so they are looking at what they are going to do with that cash moving forward. If you marry that with the Wall Street Journal's supposition that companies hope to gain more control over materials, manufacturing and distribution through vertical integration, you're talking Bill Leber's language.
