Mon.Dec 18, 2023

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Mexico’s nearshoring wave is years in the making

Supply Chain Dive

Decades of investments in logistics infrastructure, trade deals and becoming a manufacturing hub are paying off as shippers look to nearshore production.

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Navigating the Holiday Season: Managing High Retail Return Rates

Supply Chain Brain

By adapting their strategies, leveraging technology, and embracing innovative concepts like "keep it" returns and buy-online-return-in-store (BORIS) incentives, retailers can better manage the influx of returned items.

professionals

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Trending Sources

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Shein, Temu drive 5% air freight spike in November

Supply Chain Dive

Shipments from the fast fashion companies are frequently dominating export routes from China and Hong Kong, according to Xeneta’s chief airfreight officer.

Export 120
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Examples and uses of GIS

IBM Supply Chain Blog

One of the largest sources of data is all around us—that is, geospatial data. This is information relating to the Earth’s surface, its climate, the people who live on it, its ecosystems and more. Geographic information systems (GIS ) visualize and make sense of this data, helping people and businesses better understand the patterns and relationships of our world.

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Load Optimization: A Sustainable Way To Reduce Transportation Costs

Discover strategies to optimize load building and achieve significant transportation cost savings. Plus, learn how load optimization can help reduce CO 2 emissions and align with climate regulations and consumer expectations. Finally, discover best practices for sustainable load optimization.

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Shipping lines avoid Suez Canal as Red Sea attacks continue

Supply Chain Dive

Carriers' move to reroute or pause vessel transits could add time and monetary costs for shippers.

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7 Things To Consider For Efficient Spare Parts Management

SCMDOJO

In the world of manufacturing and maintenance, effective spare parts management is essential for maximizing equipment uptime and reducing costs. Making sure the correct spare parts are easily accessible when needed can greatly boost profits and how well it operates. Yet, handling spare parts can be tricky and needs careful planning and execution. In this detailed guide, you’ll delve into the most effective ways to manage spare parts.

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Gatekeeper: Vendor Analysis — Contract lifecycle management and third-party risk management solution overview, roadmap, tech selection tips, analyst summary

Spend Matters

This Spend Matters Vendor Analysis provides an overview of Gatekeeper and its contract lifecycle management (CLM) and third-party risk management (TPRM) solution. A fast-growing provider, Gatekeeper offers an interesting value proposition, combining CLM with native TPRM functionalities, two areas that are often linked but usually addressed with disparate software tools.

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Takeaways From the Global Supply Chain Leaders Conference

Supply Chain Brain

More than 100 supply chain, logistics, manufacturing, and procurement professionals gathered in Houston to discuss the challenges and opportunities in today’s post-pandemic landscape.

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How DNS traffic steering extends the business value of hybrid and multicloud networking

IBM Supply Chain Blog

In the most recent version of its “Cloud Hype Cycle,” Gartner placed multi-cloud network operations in the “peak of inflated expectations, perilously close to the ‘trough of disappointment.'” While this may reflect the state of both hybrid and multicloud networking at an aggregate level, there is an abundance of nuance lurking underneath Gartner’s assessment.

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BP Suspends Oil and Gas Shipment through Red Sea

Supply Chain Brain

BP is the first oil company to directly halt its own shipping, after five major ocean carriers halted service through The Bab al-Mandab strait.

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Autonomous AI Agents Are the Future of Procurement and Supply Chain Operations

As early as next year, procurement and supply chain operations will begin to adopt AI agents, often called “agentic AI,” to work alongside employees to make and execute decisions with precision across procurement and even the most complex global supply chains. Unlike LLM-based generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, these AI agents do not require prompts from humans.

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Brands: Make Vendor Compliance an Investment, Not a Cost

SCMR (Supply Chain Management Review)

Traditionally, vendors viewed vendor compliance as a burdensome cost. Truthfully, it is to a certain extent. But it also can be an investment that can be turned internally and used to benefit the vendor company widely.

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Railroads Urge Border Officials to Reopen U.S.-Mexico Crossings

Supply Chain Brain

“While the company understands this is a complex humanitarian crisis, most migrants are not crossing the border on trains,” Union Pacific said in a statement.

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To better understand the use of generative AI in procurement, you must first understand agent-based modeling and strand commonality.

Procurement Insights

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is my comment to a LinkedIn post by Kimberly-Clark ‘s Rajesh Kumawat ABACUS Timing is everything. In another discussion stream, I just provided the following response that aligns with Tamera Fenske ‘s “backbone of the company” comment: NOW you have given me something to consider, e.g., Google Gemini.

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Railroads urge reopening of Eagle Pass and El Paso, Texas border crossings

Supply Chain Dive

U.S. Customs and Board Protection shut down the vital trade gateways in the wake of surging immigration activity.

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Freight Procurement Simplified: Bids from Hours to Minutes

Speaker: Eric Berdinis, Ran Sun, & Chris Chmielewski

Procuring freight can be cumbersome, time-consuming, and error-prone. If you’re frustrated with the complex and manual processes for obtaining bids for your contract and spot freight, you’re not alone. In today’s fast-moving supply chain environment, optimizing these processes is critical to staying competitive and cutting costs. Join this exclusive webinar with experts from Uber Freight to learn how the latest digital tools and automation can transform your freight procurement strategy by strea

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U.S. Announces New Task Force to Counter Houthi Red Sea Threat

Supply Chain Brain

The attacks in the Red Sea, which handles about 12% of world trade as a key waterway for goods and energy, have emerged as a fresh threat to global supply chains.

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New Year Insights for the procurement solutions and services marketplace 2024: The Classification Guru

Spend Matters

For several years now, Spend Matters has been collecting and publishing a series of articles about procurement, supply and services trends for the year ahead from expert tech and service providers in the market. This year we’re highlighting the customer demands, market movements and advances in procurement tech that are exciting the world of solution providers, how they expect them to shape the S2P landscape next year and how they plan to respond to them.

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U.S. Steel Agrees to Be Bought by Japanese Rival After Long Takeover Saga

Supply Chain Brain

The acquisition is a further consolidation of the industry in the United States, which is now dominated by three major companies: Cleveland-Cliffs, Nucor and Steel Dynamics.

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Forward Air plans general rate increase of 5.9%

Supply Chain Dive

The new rate will be tendered on shipments beginning Feb. 5, the carrier announced last week.

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How To Align Product Management And Supply Chain Operations For Successful Product Launches

Speaker: Shalini Dinesh

Effective cross-functional collaboration and communication heavily influence product launch success. Research shows that as many as 70% of product launches fail due to inadequate coordination among stakeholders, including supply chain, product management, legal, marketing, and change control teams (Gartner, 2022). The 2023 Supply Chain Insights Report highlights that 60% of supply chain disruptions are caused by poor communication and misalignment among cross-functional teams.

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Troubleshoot your network with DNS Insights

IBM Supply Chain Blog

It is relatively simple to see that something is wrong with your network using DNS data. A spike in NXDOMAIN responses or other errors usually serves as a clear indication that something is amiss. The next step—diagnosing the source of the problem and then actually doing something about those errors—is often a heavier lift. It is a data problem.

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How to get more value from digital procurement data

Supply Chain Dive

Companies are turning to digital procurement tools for better access to data and visibility of spend.

Data 86
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How NS1 ensures seamless DNS migrations

IBM Supply Chain Blog

Migrating a mission-critical system like authoritative DNS is always going to involve some amount of risk. Whenever you’re flipping a switch from one infrastructure provider to another, the possibility of downtime is always lurking in the background. Unfortunately, many network admins use this risk potential as a reason to continue using an authoritative DNS service that no longer adds business value.

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Understanding Sourcing Agents

Procurement Freelancers

Sourcing agents commonly serve as vital intermediaries specializing in locating, evaluating, and engaging suppliers on…

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The Ultimate Guide to Transportation and Load Building Optimization

Enhance your transportation and load building efficiency with our comprehensive guide. Learn to tackle today's supply chain challenges and optimize your approach with advanced planning strategies. This guide covers: Supply Chain Challenges: Discover how transportation planning can address critical issues and improve efficiency. Load Building Benefits: Understand how effective load building can enhance your transportation processes.

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Why you shouldn’t use Global Anycast DNS in China

IBM Supply Chain Blog

Anycast is a standard, table-stakes feature of every authoritative DNS service. It makes sense: inbound queries should always be routed to the best available servers—usually the ones that are geographically closest. Yet, there is one glaring exception: China. The internet in mainland China is walled off from the rest of the world. Any DNS query that crosses into or out of mainland China must pass through a series of filters and other controls before it can be passed along for resolution.

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Why Self-Reflection is a Powerful Negotiation Tool

Negotiations Ninja

Enda Is the Managing Director of Mediation Northern Ireland. He jokes that he’s a recovering mechanical engineer. He lives in Northern Ireland and became involved in conflict resolution as a teenager. One day—the organization he’s now the director of—offered a one-day course on mediation in his community.

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How to optimize application performance with NS1 traffic steering

IBM Supply Chain Blog

“I want it now!”—This isn’t just a phrase spoiled children sing ; it’s what we demand every time we click a link, stream video content or access an online application. As internet traffic grows in volume and complexity, our expectations for faster response times from the services and content we use rises. We often click away if instant results aren’t provided.

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Magnus Mondays: What’s in Store for 2024

CPO Rising

As we close in on the end of the year and I settle in at Ardent Partners, I wanted to take a moment to look toward 2024. Rather than an article on predictions, I want to share what I’m most excited about covering in the year ahead.

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How Hellenic Bank Transformed Its Indirect Procurement Operations With GEP Software

Financial institutions must navigate a complex web of policies, procedures and regulations to ensure compliance and manage risk. When Hellenic Bank, a leading retail lender in Cyprus, set out to transform its procurement operations, it needed more than just software deployment. It required a partner that would help embed its intricate buying processes — with all its validations, risk assessments and tiered approvals — into a unified system.

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Types of business strategy

IBM Supply Chain Blog

In today’s business environment, regardless of the product or service, leaders must develop a well-honed business strategy. Without clarity and intention, even the most innovative companies are unlikely to succeed. A successful business strategy must clearly define an organization’s objectives, decision-making processes and long-term business goals.

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Navigating the AI revolution: balancing risks and rewards in procurement

Spotlight on Procurement

Aris Georgopoulos, Assistant Professor in Public Law and European Law at the University of Nottingham, who is also the Head of Innovation, AI, Strategic, and Defence Procurement Research Unit, discusses AI in the context of procurement and how it has the potential to change the way we see the world, the way that we work and the way that we live our lives.

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What Is Rum data and why does it matter?

IBM Supply Chain Blog

What is RUM data? Contrary to what you might think, RUM data isn’t a performance indicator for Captain Morgan, Cuban tourism or a Disney film franchise. Real User Monitoring (RUM) data is information about how people interact with online applications and services. Think of it like an always-on, real-time survey of what your users experience online.

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5 Procurement Trends Shaping 2024

Pipefy

Improvements to existing procurement processes, procedures, and operations are as time-sensitive as ever. In the 2024 State of Procurement Data Report by Amazon Business, 95% of decision-makers surveyed acknowledge that there’s room for procurement optimization. In 2023, our procurement predictions focused on five key areas: The growing emphasis on burnout prevention.

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How To Set Up Innovation So That It Aligns With And Enables Corporate Strategy

Speaker: Paul Heller

Most innovation work proceeds independently from company strategy. As a result, the products that arrive in the market are not well aligned with the company’s goals. This challenge is particularly significant in organizations with transformation-oriented strategies, where innovation must directly support growth, scalability, and strategic pivots. In this session, we will discuss why innovation in large companies is so often not aligned with the company’s strategy and what innovation leaders, pro