With the U.S.-versus-the-world trade war threat heating up, Harley-Davidson Inc. and Jack Daniel’s maker Brown-Forman Corp. may just be the canaries in the coal mine.
As a massive horde of soccer fans gather in stadiums across Russia for the World Cup to cheer on their favorite team, one thing is for certain: they’ll be armed with plenty of money to spend. Is your supply chain prepared to serve them?
Grocers including Walmart Inc., Jumbo Group Ltd. and Whole Foods Market Inc. fared poorly in ratings looking at the treatment of the women, farmers and food-sector workers who supply supermarket shelves in the U.S. and European Union.
From global manufacturers such as Harley-Davidson Inc to small tech startups, companies are scrambling to rework supply chains built for an era of stable, open trade policy that is now under threat.
Animal welfare in fashion has had a huge boost last week. Asos — the second biggest clothing site in the U.K., with 64.4 million visitors in the six months to May 2018 — has pledged to ban silk, mohair, cashmere and feathers from its site from January 2019. In addition, products using down, teeth and bone — including mother-of-pearl, which is taken from the shell of some molluscs — also fall under the planned ban.
Challenge: Growth driven by acquisitions left a global manufacturer with a mixed bag of ERP systems — resulting in an unconsolidated view of spend and an inability to quickly analyze data. The manual reporting system, combined with data extraction and trust issues, was costly and left the manufacturer with a poor understanding of true supplier expenses.
Challenge: A major international automotive manufacturer was experiencing a high rate of supply chain damage. The component racks which held car parts during transit had passed impact and vibration testing, but shipments were still arriving damaged. With no way to tell what was causing the damage, the automotive company had to get creative.
