The Supply Chain: 4/8/2015

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/

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

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

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.