As a major distributor of food supplies to restaurants, Quality Custom Distribution must monitor and document warehouse and in-transit temperatures for products ranging across four different temperature zones. A custom designed fleet and tailored solutions ensure supply chain integrity for every customer.
Rising healthcare costs, competitive industry pressures, and concerns over stable power supplies in the face of recent severe natural disasters have generated a new and concentrated focus on the ways in which healthcare facilities procure, use and manage energy, according to a report from Navigant Research. These forces are driving governments and organizations to adopt new technologies to monitor and control energy use in in healthcare facilities. Global healthcare facility energy management system revenue is expected to grow from $948.8m annually in 2015 to $2.2bn in 2024.
The rise of the social web provides an abundance of opportunities to reach and engage with potential customers, but these added touch points muddy the waters when it comes to effectively tracking and monitoring your company's interactions with individual prospects.
There is no doubt that big data has become a growth market, and is becoming one of the few on-premises projects seeing increased spending, as companies move less data-sensitive functions to the cloud. But where's the needed talent?
Fragmentation in the healthcare industry's supply chain inhibits the ability to evaluate clinical efficacy of purchased supplies, as well as identify opportunities to improve efficiency.
Luxottica Group, a global luxury sunglass and eyeglass company, reports that it has improved quality, as well as the efficiency of its receiving, quality-inspection and subsequent re-stocking of returned products, by between 30 and 50 percent, by deploying a Near Field Communication RFID system. The solution employs an NFC dangle tag attached to each frame, and software that enables workers to view data about the item, and to update its status via NFC-enabled tablets.
The results of the 2014 GS1 US Standards Usage Survey show that apparel and general merchandise manufacturers and retailers are using item level electronic product code-enabled radio frequency identification to enhance inventory visibility and respond to consumer demands for omni-channel options.
Mobility is a hot topic these days. Regardless of industry or profession, a mobile application or ecosystem is in development to serve it. The supply chain is no different. In fact, given its very manual and distributed nature, the supply chain is better suited to mobile application deployment than most business processes. For distribution and fulfillment services, where most of the activities take place away from the desktop, the extension of business processes to mobile applications just makes sense. Most CEOs today are looking to the supply chain for competitive advantage (think Amazon's drones), so the time is right for supply chain managers to begin the process of introducing mobile into their processes.
