Theresa Campobasso
Senior Vice President of Strategic Accounts at Exiger
Given it was the military world that gave rise to the term ‘logistics’, it seems fitting that the supply chain security expertise of Theresa Campobasso was forged during her years as in the US Marine Corps.
Theresa served four years in the Corps, working in intelligence, learning along the way that a military force is only as secure and effective as its supply chain.
Those are lessons that have given precisely the right mindset for her current role, as SVP, Strategic Accounts, Government Solutions for risk management specialist, Exiger.
government); and federal bodies.
To date, Theresa’s supply chain security expertise has helped 46 government organisations, including the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, as well as federal bodies that handle civilian programmes and defence customers.
It is a long way removed from Theresa’s start in the Marine Corps.
“I was passionate about intelligence, geopolitical analysis and counterintelligence,” she says. “It was around 2008, so the US was firmly entrenched in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, and counter-terrorism was obviously a big focus.”
Which was why, following basic training, she was surprised to be posted to Japan. It proved to be a sliding-doors moment, because it was there that she got her first taste of supply chain security.
“China is right on Japan’s doorstep,” she says. “There was a big focus on supply chain security, on technology and maintaining that advantage.”
She served as an intelligence officer for around four years, eventually deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Asked about her proudest professional achievement, Theresa says this came when she first left the military, to take up her first private-sector job, with KPMG.
There she had the opportunity to follow her passion for micro-electronic supply chain provenance.
She says: “We created capability with our partners that could image circuits and determine if there were non-conforming parts in the assembly, or any counterfeit or compromised parts. The scanner could read serial numbers and identify the companies that had created those parts, what that supply chain looked like and what the chain of custody was.
Theresa and her team got to demonstrate the software at an Air Force defence incubator competition, designed to find ways to accelerate innovation within the US Department of Defense, “because it can be very bureaucratic”.
She says: “We were one of the three winners of that event. The risk-management element to supply chain is one of the things that I'm passionate about, and that's part of what I brought to Exiger when I joined the company almost four years ago.”
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