The Supply Chain: 4/8/2015
- IBM actually sells off a portion of their supply chain software (not Emptoris) to LlamaSoft:
Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Llamasoft said it will buy IBM’s LogicNet Plus, the Inventory and Product Flow Analyst, and IBM’s Transportation Analyst products. Llamasoft has been growing fast in recent years due to increased interest in the company’s specialties of supply chain modeling, analytics and optimization. Under the transaction, Llamasoft will absorb the IBM supply chain technology and support team.
http://www.dcvelocity.com/articles/20150401-llamasoft-acquires-ibms-supply-chain-application-suite/
- SAP Looks To Procurement Services Market To Boost Revenues, Protect Margins
Corporate procurement services is a lucrative market that’s already served by software bigwigs like Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) and Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM). Research firm Frost & Sullivan estimates that the B2B online retail market will grow to $6.7 trillion by 2020 due to rapid adoption of online purchasing platforms. [2] Corporate procurement service providers stand to make billions of dollars in fees by providing cloud-based platforms and management services to facilitate such online purchases by big companies.
- SAP is also expanding their software offerings:
By developing a product innovation platform, the connected products portfolio is capable of managing and integrating customer-driven engineering innovations by coordinating every ‘business function’ and ‘bill of material requirements.’ This portfolio will not only deliver considerable improvement over existing solutions but also develop new functionality, which will make manufacturing companies more responsive to customer demand.
http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/169617/sap-brings-extended-solution-portfolio-for-improved-scm
- Supply Chain as as source of compliance innovation (this doesn’t sound familiar does it?)
To truly understand your compliance risk from all third parties, including those in the Supply Chain, you have to get out of the ivory tower and on the road. This is even truer when exploring innovation. You do not have hit the road with the “primary goal to be the inception point for innovation” but through such interactions, innovation can come about “organically”. There is little downside for a compliance practitioner to go and visit a Supply Chain partner and have a “face-to-face meeting simply to get to know the partner better and more precisely identify that partner’s needs.”
http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/supply-chain-as-a-source-of-compliance-i-72976/
This article gets a little to “ra-ra” and not enough real world example for my taste, but I like the idea. - Here is another post detailing the shift from traditional procurement to a big data/business intelligence area (more of a POS/Retail view, but the concept is sound).
http://www.internationalsupermarketnews.com/news/18577
The Supply Chain: 4/1/2015
- Supply Chain News: Strategic Sourcing Software Enabling Companies to Continue to Raise the Bar on Capabilities, Gartner Says
http://www.scdigest.com/ONTARGET/15-03-26-1.PHP?cid=9138&ctype=content - Dunkin Donuts saves $114 million thanks to SCM cooperative
Formed following the successful merger of five different operating companies in 2012, NDCP opened its corporate office in metro Atlanta in August 2013 as a more geographically central location to support customer expansion plans and access best-in-class supply chain resources. Leveraging more than 30 years of proven expertise in sourcing, purchasing and distribution, the organisation is passionate about delivering the best service and products at the lowest sustainable price to members.
- Resetting supplier relationships should be top of the board agenda
Procurement has often been viewed as the poor relation when it comes to business strategy, but there is clear evidence that corporate reputation and customer satisfaction can be directly affected by poor or non-strategic purchasing decisions. For example, an organisation we have worked with took a strategic decision never to charge a customer for speaking to the customer service department, only to discover some months later that one of its outsourced call centre providers was still using premium rate numbers. Clearly no one had told the procurement department about the strategic decision, let alone involved them in formulating the strategy in the first place. Being more joined up can only be good for business
- Procurement professionals split on how to tackle maverick spend
Almost one third (31 per cent) of respondents from public and private sectors said control of indirect spend should be handed to the procurement function to solve the problem, even though indirect costs appear to be the shared responsibility of a number of different departments within the respondent organisations: procurement (63 per cent), senior department heads (42 per cent), finance (39 per cent) and operational staff (25 per cent).
The Supply Chain: 3/25/2015
- Amazon and the extended supply chain
“Well, [Amazon] does have very strong supply chain and financing capabilities, and it knows a little something about managing information given that it has dominant share in the infrastructure as a service industry with Amazon Web Services … Amazon also knows how to sell its value to suppliers, to enable suppliers, to integrate them and to offer them tons of value-added services. The biggest of these services include inventory management and financing.”
https://spendmatters.com/2015/03/11/the-wonders-of-amazon-and-the-extended-supply-chain/
- Jaguar leverages supply chain to drive growth:
It is working in collaboration with government on automotive strategy. “We are going to grow the supply chain – we want new technologies to flow through. For example, he said: “We have a proving factory to take a prototype and work out the manufacturing steps to get it produced.”
http://www.supplychainstandard.com/2015/03/jaguar-harnesses-supply-chain-to-drive-growth/
- Reverse auctions draw criticism in Capitol Hill:
Both Gordon and the Government Accountability Office see potential in reverse auctions to drive down agency costs, and promote contracting competition. But after five years of increased reliance on the tactic, as of 2013 “the potential benefits … had not been maximized by the agencies” that use them, reported GAO.
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/517/3823322/Reverse-auctions-draw-strong-criticism-on-Capitol-Hill
- Innovation and supply chain remain key for Nike:
http://www.just-style.com/analysis/innovation-and-supply-chain-remain-key-for-nike_id124712.aspx?utm_source=article-feed&utm_medium=rss-feed&utm_campaign=rss-feed - The five ingredients of ‘the whole enchilada’ of supply chain sustainability
The idea of category management and working with suppliers over a longer term is not new. I was doing it in the oil and gas sector in the 1990s and Japanese industries were doing it long before this. Incorporating sustainability is a bit harder because it is a complex and ever-changing subject which needs some knowledge from the buyer and for them to be properly advised by competent internal or external experts, which are in short supply.
The Supply Chain: 3/11/2015
- Here is apple’s entire supplier responsibility standards document. It clearly addresses all of the Chinese factory supply chain issues they have faced over the last 6 years. Interesting read:
https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdfs/supplier_responsibility_standards.pdf - When hospitals manage their supply chain:
One of the biggest factors in successfully cutting supply chain costs is having real-time, actionable data. It’s not enough to have data, you have to manage the data in a way that makes it useful to empower better decision-making. While this is easier said than done, the increased availability of data standards and new technologies to help you manage data will make it possible.
The important data points you need to extract from your ERP system and contract repository include: vendor master, contract master, purchase order headers, item master, invoice payment lines, spend classification, contract items, purchase order lines and invoice/payment header. Additionally, your purchase order spend must be identified and rationalized.
http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/blog/supply-chain-expertise-enters-hospital-c-suite
- 6 Supply Chain Challenges:
Everyone is talking about ‘big data’ and its impact on the supply chain but be aware: it won’t solve all your problems! It is easy to be swept along by the promise that big data is going to answer all of your questions about supply chain performance (and even those you didn’t think you needed to ask) but the reality is that big data, to a degree, is a misnomer. The challenge isn’t managing the data, the challenge lies in realising the insight that the data offers. With the right tools in place organisations can gain visibility into the supply chains to identify areas of concern as well as areas of potential growth in order to make them more streamline
http://www.supplychaindigital.com/procurement/3863/Six-challenges-that-could-break-the-supply-chain
- Infographic: Supply Chain Risks
http://www.kinaxis.com/Global/resources/papers/supply-chain-risks-infographic-kinaxis.pdf