Archive for February, 2009
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
Has the supply chain got you shackled? Laugh at familiar supply chain management headaches in the comedy video series: Married to the Job— a joint production between The Second City Communications and Kinaxis. These supply chain themed videos embrace the antics of ACME’s manufacturing operations staff. See how Sibley, in supply chain planning, balances working [...]
Posted in Professional Communications, Videos | No Comments »
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
From supplychainstandard.com: “Recent trends in outsourcing the manufacture of goods to distant low-cost economies have significantly increased risk within the supply chain. Distance and longer lead-times have heightened the chances of interruptions in supply, with disruptions and congestion at ports being possible risk factors. But global supply chains are set to experience unprecedented shocks to [...]
Posted in Emerging Trends, Security | No Comments »
Friday, February 27th, 2009
Amid continuing confusion over the scale, scope and timing of planned legislation governing carbon emissions, a leading force in the development of carbon optimisation software is warning that the entire issue could become meaningless unless all nations agree to a common emissions accounting standard.
Ewan French, co-developer of the world-beating CAST-CO2 carbon optimisation software and Chief [...]
Posted in Emerging Trends, Environment, New Ideas, News & Info, Support Services & Industry Initiatives | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
If you haven’t seen it yet, the FAIL Blog is a continuous source of true failures of all sorts and in today’s stressful world we’ve found these items can be a momentary source of immense entertainment and instantaneous amusement.
There are a number of entertaining logistics examples and we will bring them to you as we [...]
Posted in FAILED, Freight & Transportation | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
The real challenge to Lean, however, requires this first change, a shift in the culture. Consumer products manufacturers are early on in their Lean journey compared to companies across industry, with 56% less than a year to 3 years into it. By leveraging external expertise and taking small steps in their Lean programs, these manufacturers [...]
Posted in Emerging Trends, Lean, New Ideas | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
In the last several years, the manufacturing sector has moved from vertically organized structures to horizontal organizations; that is, a single company no longer controls its product from, let’s say, the mine to the store shelf. Instead, today’s companies control only pieces of the supply chain, and the companies and divisions controlling those various components [...]
Posted in Emerging Trends, Lean, New Ideas | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
Using Lean principles, manufacturers have made significant improvements to their operations, from improved productivity, increased resource utilization, to a more accurate understanding of product costs. One area where manufacturers may not have thought to apply Lean is the workforce. But as labor pressures increase and margins tighten, savvy manufacturers are turning their attention to the [...]
Posted in Emerging Trends, Lean, New Ideas | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
From cnn.com: “More than one-third of all weapons the United States has procured for Afghanistan’s government are missing, according to a government report released Thursday. The U.S. military failed to “maintain complete inventory records for an estimated 87,000 weapons — or about 36 percent — of the 242,000 weapons that the United States procured and [...]
Posted in Inventory, News & Info, Security, Spend Management | No Comments »
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
The results of a 1,300 company ERP survey have been completed and the results suggest Tier II ERP solutions may be preferable to the Tier I providers especially during these tough economic times. Specifically this is because the Tier II solutions cost roughly a quarter of the Tier I solutions ($12.6-$16.8M vs $2.6-$3.5M) and there [...]
Posted in Emerging Trends, Information Technology, News & Info, Professional Communications | 4 Comments »
Friday, February 20th, 2009
From Ventana Research: “Organizations trying to develop new products more efficiently and expand sales inevitably must address limitations in the ways they manage product information. As they add suppliers to their business networks, products to their catalogs and materials purchases to their supply chains, additional data is brought into their information systems, often in new [...]
Posted in Information Technology, Professional Communications, Support Services & Industry Initiatives | No Comments »
Friday, February 20th, 2009
From RoshanThomas: ” Nortel Networks Corp, once a telecommunications equipment giant, after years of being under tremendous pressures and trying numerous reorganization and cost-cutting actions to improve its competitive position, filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors on Jan 14th 2009. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was expected to pay creditors $107 million [...]
Posted in Emerging Trends, SOX/Bill 198, Security, Supply Chain Fraud | No Comments »
Thursday, February 19th, 2009
From purchasing.com: ” A series of interviews with global sourcing experts confirms the findings of a recent Procurement Strategy Council report outlining the potential damage that hidden costs can do to the savings potential of a global sourcing program. According to a recent report from the Procurement Strategy Council, the most overlooked cost issues in [...]
Posted in Emerging Trends, Freight & Transportation, News & Info, Spend Management, Supply Chain Management | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 19th, 2009
From msnbc.com: “Bristlecone, one of the industry’s most trusted supply chain business advisors and solution providers, today announced the publication of a study, “The Hidden Risk in Your Supply Chain,” carried out in conjunction with Supply & Demand Chain Executive magazine. The research, which sought to gauge the ability of corporations to identify and manage [...]
Posted in Emerging Trends, Information Technology, New Ideas, News & Info, Professional Communications, SOX/Bill 198, Security, Supply Chain Fraud, Supply Chain Management, Support Services & Industry Initiatives | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
From CIO.com: “All set planning your supply chain strategy for 2009? How are the sales forecasts shaping up? Staying on top of your customer orders? What are your collaboration plans with your sourcing and retail partners? In truth, I’m sitting here wondering how any company is planning for the future right now. As an example [...]
Posted in Emerging Trends, Inventory, News & Info, Supply Chain Management | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
From scdigest.com: “I was reading the recent SCDigest article Just How Big is the Out-of-Stock Problem in Retail?, and the definition of what the report called an “out of stock” reminded me of what we called in the “old” days of retail the “Walk to Buy” ratio. Simply put, how many customers walked out [...]
Posted in Inventory, News & Info | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
Browse through our growing list of relevant and free Transportation & Logistics magazines, white papers, downloads and podcasts to find the titles that best match your information needs; topics include distribution, rail and ship transport, supply chain management and automation. Simply complete the application form and submit it. Many are available in digital editions [...]
Posted in | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
Supply chain management and Lean methodologies are now being applied effectively by HR professionals to ensure the talent supply chain doesn’t run into shortages or even worse, out of stocks! SCN has put together a page of free whitepapers on these topics and even included a number of HR professional journals.
Posted in | No Comments »
Monday, February 16th, 2009
CEVA Logistics, a leading global supply chain management company, today announced it provided a winning logistics program for Pirelli Tire North America (PTNA) at this year’s 47th Annual Rolex 24 at Daytona, the first and longest race in the 2009 Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series season. CEVA’s solutions for Pirelli involved pre- and post-race coordination [...]
Posted in News & Info, Third Party Logistics | No Comments »