Tag: Risk Management

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The Supply Chain: 4/8/2015

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  • 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.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3046296-sap-looks-to-procurement-services-market-to-boost-revenues-protect-margins

  • 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
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The Supply Chain: 3/11/2015

 

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  • 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
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The Supply Chain: 3/4/2015

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  • The Western procurement issue in China (Yes, the US did have some kind of back-door spying equipment installed in American-branded equipment but China isn’t an innocent party – they have been ripping off US patents and designs for years to get their manufacturers competitive.  )

    Yes, the US did have some kind of back-door spying equipment installed in American-branded equipment but China isn’t an innocent party – they have been ripping off US patents and designs for years to get their manufacturers competitive.

    http://www.techworm.net/2015/02/leading-western-technology-brands-like-apple-intelmcafee-shunned-from-chinas-approved-tech-listing.html

  • SAP: Welcome to the new era of procurement:

    Procurement can and will play an increasingly strategic role in managing this virtual enterprise, leveraging technology to simplify the way complex business gets done and manage their operations in a new and dynamic way that keeps their companies ahead of the competition. Procurement is evolving from service to a function. And with increasing frequency, it is focused on business value and enabling supplier innovations as opposed to just driving procurement savings through cost reductions.

    http://www.news-sap.com/procurement-2015-evolution-continues/

  • Four ways to access the strength of suppliers:

    A company with a high proportion of long-term contract agreements in its order book is likely to be more secure than a firm completing work on a shorter term basis. However, a retained contract should not prompt reckless overconfidence; it is often a good idea to look over notice periods and analyse the probability of changes in market conditions or demand which could reduce a client’s requirement for the business’ goods or services.

    http://www.supplymanagement.com/blog/2015/02/four-ways-to-assess-the-strength-of-suppliers

  • Failure to Work With Minority Owned Businesses a Challenge in the Private and Public Sector

    Last month, the NAACP Florida State Conference led by President Adora Obi Nweze released an Economic Development Report Card on the records of targeted cities, counties, school districts and private corporations in the State of Florida. What stood out amidst all of the findings were the poor minority procurement practices that were consistent through the public and private sector. In summary, most local governments spent less than two percent with veteran, minority and women -owned businesses.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dedrick-muhammad/failure-to-work-with-mino_b_6736984.html

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The Supply Chain: 1/21/2015

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  • Assessing and managing risk: Interview with IBM’s Louis R. Ferretti

    As supply chains have become more global, the complexities of managing risk across vast and varied physical and political geographies arguably have grown by orders of magnitude. That’s a lesson that IBM, one of the world’s largest technology companies, has taken to heart. Beginning in 2009, the company undertook the task of building a complex supply chain risk management tool, now deployed globally, that provides managers with a way to examine supply risk in a much more robust fashion than ever before.

    http://www.dcvelocity.com/articles/20150116-assessing-and-managing-risk-interview-with-ibms-louis-r-ferretti/

  • Supply chain risk has companies on edge:

    In its fourth such survey, the Allianz Risk Barometer 2015 shows “business interruption and supply chain” risks remains of most concern for 47 per cent of respondents for the third year in succession.

    http://www.fullyloaded.com.au/news/logistics/1501/supply-chain-risks-have-companies-most-on-edge-allianz/

  • Corrupt government procurement leads to $1.5 trillion mistake:

    The F-35 fighter jet was supposed to do a bit of everything, as James Fallows explains in “The Tragedy of the American Military”. Instead, the aircraft can barely do anything: it has trouble flying at night, its engines have exploded during takeoff, and early models suffered structural cracks. There’s no end in sight, either. The all-in costs of this airplane are estimated to be as much as $1.5 trillion. (That’s approximately the same price as the entire Iraq War.) In an Atlantic magazine video, Fallows explains how such a disastrous project came to be—and why it can’t be stopped.

    http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/01/pentagons-15-trillion-mistake-is-one-of.html

  • Making supply chain green:

    Workers in sustainable supply chain management must be adept at negotiating supply chain complexities and creatively applying broad business and environmental knowledge. Weaving between profit-related subjects and environmental research generated by NGOs, they innovate cross-sector solutions seamlessly. These workers represent a new breed of eco-polymath and they are in demand.

    http://www.alternativesjournal.ca/community/blogs/aj-special-delivery/greening-supply-chain-management

  • Is There a Third Option for SCM Executives Looking to Revamp their Supply Chain Management Operations?

    Improvements need to be achieved in months, not years, a reality that can only be realized through a managed services partnership in which the only measure of success is tied to the operational improvements resulting from the program. While many supply chain executives have never seriously considered managed services as an SCM option due to liability, performance or security risk concerns, this is indeed an economical, efficient and strategically viable solution that supply chain leaders should consider to deliver operational performance.

    http://blog.kinaxis.com/2015/01/is-there-a-third-option-for-scm-executives-looking-to-revamp-their-supply-chain-management-operations/

  • What if the Problem Isn’t the Rules, but the People? [This is a good article on Federal sourcing, but it applies]

    The study found that while there certainly are problems in buying and implementing the latest technology in government, “many federal leaders believe that these problems are the result of execution of the procurement process rather than regulatory requirements.” While nearly 40 percent of the more than 500 survey respondents had some influence in the procurement process, only one of them cited problems with the Federal Acquisition Regulation in written comments.

    http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/fedblog/2015/01/what-if-problem-isnt-rules-people/102792/