Brian Holland, the CFO and president of Fleet Advantage, a truck leasing and big data firm, was trying to put his finger on what it means to be a finance chief at the kind of fast-growing, sales-driven companies that have employed him over his more than 20-year career. And then he thought of something a former boss had said to him: “You’re one of the few bean counters that I can even stand to be around.”
Price optimization is the next frontier on the retail battle lines, with Walmart and Amazon waging a fierce battle to best each other on price. It's a fight that Amazon is winning thanks to its pricing strategy, according to the Price Perception Index (PPI) for digital retail.
Once again, ChainLink Research and SupplyChainBrain are conducting research into the business challenges companies are confronting and what strategies and solutions they plan to use to address those issues.
In less than a decade, the mobile internet revolution has overtaken the digital revolution and is still accelerating. Mobile penetration is increasing, the costs of access and devices are coming down, and more and more people in both developed and developing economies are using the mobile internet as their first - and often their only - means of going online. Let's look at the phenomenon in Europe.
When executives in business-to-business markets think about pricing their products, they often raise the white flag before even stepping onto the battlefield. Over the years, they've accumulated beliefs that limit their pricing effectiveness.
Five beliefs, in particular, have become ingrained in many companies to the point that they seem immovable.
Top-performing procurement organizations are expanding their purview to drive company-wide innovation and top-line growth as opposed to confining themselves to their traditional roles as gatekeepers of corporate spending, according to a study from IBM.
Eighty-six percent of respondents agree that omnichannel has meant that customer and consumer expectations of the organization have increased, according to a recent SAP survey. So, as consumers increasingly use new technologies and channels to guide their purchase decisions, consumer products companies have adapted omnichannel strategies to reach these customers directly, in addition to working through the retailer as in years past.
3D printing has captured the imagination of the media and the financial markets; prognosticators are predicting a fundamental disruption in the manufacturing paradigm, from mass production to mass customization. Are we finally achieving the "lot size of one" that Taiichi Ohno envisioned when creating the Toyota Production System? Will factories disappear as the "maker movement" drives demand toward custom-designed items created on 3D printers in the home? How will these changes affect the industrial supply chains?
The European plastics industry has published a manifesto alerting officials in Brussels to the many impediments it faces, and which it hopes will influence European Union policy.