Tim Combs has been appointed president and CEO of Addison, Ill.-based Associated Integrated Supply Chain Solutions, the company said today. The appointment marks a return engagement for Combs, who served as Associated's general manager from 2009 to 2010.
Combs most recently served as president of sales and marketing at The Raymond Corp., a Greene, N.Y.-based lift truck maker. Associated is one of Raymond's largest lift truck dealers in the United States.
Associated also provides other types of warehouse equipment; facility and distribution-network design; labor-management engineering; systems integration; and aftermarket services. Some of those capabilities came on board when Associated acquired the Atlanta-based systems integrator Peach State Integrated Technologies in 2013.
Combs will replace Michael B. Romano, who recently was named president and CEO of Toyota Advanced Logistics Systems (TALS), a new business unit of Toyota Industries Corp. that will provide integrated material handling and logistics solutions. Romano will sell his majority ownership in Associated to Raymond, which currently is a minority stakeholder. Raymond also is owned by Toyota.
"I am excited and honored to take on this new endeavor to lead the ongoing growth of Associated through a strategic vision that will capitalize on Associated's nearly 300-percent growth over the past decade," Combs said in a statement.
With Raymond as Associated's majority shareholder, the latter now enters more deeply into Toyota's orbit. Exactly how that will play out is uncertain. In an interview with DC Velocity in late February, Romano said TALS "will not necessarily" compete with Associated and Peach State. One of his responsibilities, he said, is to "assess, organize, and then to align all current competencies in this space within the Toyota enterprise. We will take people who are doing [the kind of services TALS will provide] today and try to assimilate those competencies under the TALS umbrella."
