Today's businesses need to go beyond visibility to full transparency, says Nancy Marino, partner at Columbus Consulting, whose clients are mostly retailers. This means using technology to focus the performance of independent silos on corporate KPIs, thus improving performance, she says.
Warehouse operations can be the throttle or the chokehold of a supply chain, a truth that has become more evident with the growth of e-commerce, says Robert Carver Jr., IBS director of sales. Carver discusses how technology is helping companies address challenges and opportunities in today's warehouse.
Tom Sanderson, CEO of Transplace, discusses the growing U.S.-Mexico freight market and how Transplace continues to strengthen its presence there. Sanderson also highlights border-crossing issues that continue to complicate U.S.-Mexico freight moves.
Consumers' demand for ever faster service and the overall rapid pace of change in today’s markets will force companies to completely rethink their supply chains over the next few years, says Thomas Craig, president of LTD Management.
On paper, one would think that integrating the supply chains for two maintenance organizations would be easy. Just look for areas where there is duplicated effort and inventory, rationalize those operations and realize the savings. But in practice, it's a very different matter.
Almost 25 years after the rise of warehouse management solutions to drive increased customer service levels, there still remain a significant number of Tier 1 distribution-intensive companies that continue to use manual processes to support a growing demand on the warehouse.
The past was a simpler time for distribution operations. Technology was relatively straightforward. The supply chain wasn't "always on." There was no such thing as omnichannel distribution. That's hardly the case now.
There's been a great myth sweeping across the world of procurement. It's come about as procurement technology has grown widespread and companies are vying for customers to sign onto their solutions. The myth takes the form of an eraser, scrubbing away the lines between direct and indirect procurement.
An efficient supply chain is one of the most crucial predictors of a company's success. The supply chain affects almost every marker for industry leadership, including costs, delivery performance and overall customer satisfaction. It's understandable then that the majority of supply chain executives consider visibility to be the most important aspect of any supply chain solution.
Tammy Bliss recently left a career with Fortune 500 companies to become an entrepreneur. These two worlds share many challenges, including finding and keeping talented employees, she says. Bliss also discusses her new company, ConversionR, which promotes reuse of cardboard cartons.