Spain's University Hospital of Valencia (La Fe) is employing a real-time locating system (RTLS) to track patients and assets throughout its 260,000-square-meter (2.8 million-square-foot) facility, and to allow staff members to identify patients via mobile carts with built-in RFID readers.
The CPG industry faced another year of demand volatility, marked by continued economic turbulence and weak consumer confidence, according to the Terra Technology Forecasting Benchmark Study.
Although practically everybody in the supply chain world is keenly aware of the need for progress in areas like improving supplier collaboration and risk management, the culture is inherently slow to change.
Sage North America say the results of a snapshot survey of small to medium-sized business manufacturers indicate the general health of their businesses is pretty good, and use of their enterprise resource planning systems has benefited them.
Those who make the investment in business intelligence and the cloud will realize improved cost and operational efficiencies, expanded real-time collaboration with customers, vendors and partners as well as faster and more personalized customer relationships. But how do you get there?
Downtime is the enemy of lean. Downtime is, in fact, waste. Idled lines do not add value. Restarting production after unplanned downtime requires more effort, usually expended with less efficiency and worker productivity. This reintroduces waste, which creates added costs that customers do not pay for, yet must be absorbed into cost of goods sold.
Looking at the 12-month period ending with July 2012, the winery-to-consumer shipping channel has grown to $1.35bn, representing 8.6 percent of the total U.S. wine retail market, according to a report from ShipCompliant and Wines + Vines Magazine.