A lot of people view China business as mysterious. Relax. Consumers behave pretty much the same everywhere. Competition is pretty much the same everywhere. You just need to ignore the hype and focus on the basic fact that in China today, there are six big trends. That's it. Six trends shape most of the country’s industries and drive much of China's impact on the Western world.
This year Western firms' giant bet on the emerging world will come under more scrutiny. Most multinationals are profitable in emerging markets. American firms, for example, made a 12 percent return on equity in 2012, roughly in line with their global average. But having grown fast, profits are now falling in dollar terms.
An estimated 146,000 non-farm jobs were added to U.S. payrolls in February, according to its D&B's U.S Economic Health Tracker, a monthly, multi-dimensional perspective on the U.S. economy, including small business health, total job growth, and overall U.S. business health.
Applying lean principles to management, rather than just operations, can help large organizations re-imagine how they work and unlock value through continuous improvement.
Analyst Insight: If the wheels on your vehicle are out of alignment, you're in for a rough and inefficient ride. The same holds true for businesses. Alignment, especially in strategic relationships, gets businesses beyond the initial "yes" that sets a deal in motion"”it aligns the participants throughout the life of the deal, turning it into a smooth and powerful relationship. - Kate Vitasek, Faculty, University of Tennessee's Center for Executive Education, and Founder, Supply Chain Visions
Analyst Insight: Theoretically, supply chain transformations deliver a different set of capabilities and outcomes that customers recognize. The reality is that a transformation may simply be a radical or rapid change to the supply chain organization and operations in response to changes in the marketplace. It could be a dramatic reduction in cost or improvement in service to remain competitive. In other words, the outcomes are not necessarily different, just better than the prior state. - Michael Dominy, Research Director, Gartner
Change still is a constant and it comes at today's supply chain professionals faster, with more intensity and greater risks than ever before. Art Van Bodegraven describes what this means for current and future supply chain leaders.
More than a third of manufacturing firms in the small and mid-sized business (SMB) sector expect the economy to strengthen in the coming six months, while nearly half expect it to remain the same, according to the results of the second annual Sage Manufacturing Survey announced by Sage North America. Respondents also anticipate an increase in orders, production and exports.
I was privileged to accompany the 2001 U.S. Logistics Leaders delegation to Cuba, and ended up being the expedition's recording secretary. The trip diary outlined our activities and contacts, and plunged into observations about supply chain and logistics conditions in the island nation, an inescapable force in the Caribbean Basin, a significant presence among islands it dwarfed, and with a population of some thirteen million. The trip record was published in The Journal of Business Logistics later that year.
America's 23 million small businesses should represent a giant market for big companies, particularly as small businesses leave the Great Recession in the rear-view mirror and look to invest in new equipment. One problem: Main Street doesn't seem to like large corporations much.