April, 2018

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11 Qualities of a Transparent Supply Chain

All Things Supply Chain

Supply Chain Transparency is a phrase that is continuously being thrown around; from an increasing amount of companies pledging to run more transparent supply chain operations to some companies receiving…

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S&OP 3.0 – The Future of Planning

Supply Chain Trend

Sales and Operation Planning (S&OP) made it’s break through in the 80’s, when Material Requirement Planning (MRP) was the hottest planning methodology around, computer screens had monochrome green letters, our music and dress sense were questionable, and it was common for companies to have a command and control management style. With it roots in the supply chain, this S&OP 1.0 had a strong focus on supply chain performance like improving customer service, decrease inventory and drive ass

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2018 Likely to Be Coldest Year on Record for Food Shippers

Supply Chain Collaborator

While the spring warmup seems to be “missing in action” for the Northeast US with April temps stuck 10-15 degrees below normal, you’d be right to assume we’re talking about the weather. However, what we’re actually referring to is the fact that cold-chain shippers in the food industry are facing market conditions that demand investment in more and better infrastructure to support cold chain shipping.

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10 Reasons to Consider a Transportation Management System (TMS)

The Network Effect

by Nilam Oswal, Software Analyst, SoftwareSuggest.com If your company functions in retail, distribution, manufacturing, e-commerce or third party logistics, chances. The post 10 Reasons to Consider a Transportation Management System (TMS) appeared first on The Network Effect.

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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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Moving Beyond Spreadsheets for Responsible Supply Chains

SupplyShift

I love Excel. There, I said it. It is an incredibly powerful, versatile tool that I’ve used for everything from finance to carbon modelling. With such a powerful tool, there is a temptation to use it for almost every business need. When it comes to supply chain data collection and for achieving responsible sourcing goals, most companies start with an Excel-based assessment that is sent out via email to a few key, strategic suppliers.

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Thailand Courts Foreign Investment, While Leadership Questions Remain

Supply Chain Brain

“Stop and go.” “Sway and swing.” Those were among the phrases that officials voiced at a recent seminar in Bangkok organized by the Thailand Board of Investment (BOI). Contrast that with their use of words like “continuity” and “security” to describe the junta-run government’s economic policies since it seized power. Thailand’s rulers, led by Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha, are waging an all-out campaign to attract foreign investment to the country’s infrastructure and industrial secto

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5 Best Logistics Books to Keep Within Reach

Supply Chain Opz

Are you looking for logistics management books? In this article, we will show you 5 books that'll help you learn logistics faster than any other logistics book. Do You Need a Logistics Book? In the United States, the median wage for a Logistics Manager is around $70,000 annually. So, a career in logistics management can be very lucrative if you have a career plan and keep on developing yourself.

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UltraShipTMS Earns Spot on Inbound Logistics Top 100 Logistics IT Providers List

Supply Chain Collaborator

For the Ninth Consecutive Year, Leading Solution Provider Earns Spot on Inbound Logistics Magazine’s Annual Who’s Who of Top Supply Chain Management Software Companies. March 20, 2018 – Fair Lawn, NJ – For the ninth year running, UltraShipTMS is included in Inbound Logistics magazine’s Top 100 Logistics IT Providers list. This year, honorees were selected from a pool of more than four hundred logistics IT solution providers.

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Essentials of Blockchain and Smart Contracts in the Supply Chain

The Network Effect

Bitcoin steals the limelight, but blockchain and smart contracts offer considerable benefits to business and the supply chain. Here are. The post Essentials of Blockchain and Smart Contracts in the Supply Chain appeared first on The Network Effect.

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Moving Beyond Spreadsheets for Responsible Supply Chains

SupplyShift

I love Excel. There, I said it. It is an incredibly powerful, versatile tool that I’ve used for everything from finance to carbon modelling. With such a powerful tool, there is a temptation to use it for almost every business need. When it comes to supply chain data collection and for achieving responsible sourcing goals, most companies start with an Excel-based assessment that is sent out via email to a few key, strategic suppliers.

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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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Jeff Bezos v the World: Why All Companies Fear 'Death by Amazon'

Supply Chain Brain

At $19.99 a pop, the laptop stand combines everything customers love about Amazon: utility, price and convenience. It’s also a total and complete knockoff — of a laptop stand that the San Francisco-based company Rain Design began selling nearly a decade before Amazon decided to make its own. Amazon’s innovation with its own version was to replace Rain Design’s raindrop logo with its own smiley arrow logo — and cut the price in half.

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Why Supply Chain Visibility and Transparency Need to be Top Priorities in Your Business in 2018

All Things Supply Chain

A common problem with supply chains is they become unwieldy beasts.

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Sourcing promotional products the right way

Claritum

Promotional products are items used to promote a product, service or company program including advertising specialties, premiums, incentives, business gifts, awards, prizes, commemoratives and other imprinted or decorated items. Promotional merchandise is a valuable marketing tool that can help to establish brand awareness of a company among consumers.

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New Tech Bypasses FMCSA Regulations and Mitigates Capacity Challenges Too

Supply Chain Collaborator

You could grow a long beard waiting for the federal government to rectify the problems it’s causing for carriers and drivers. Instead, why not use innovative tech solutions to do an end run around the hassles caused by the ELD mandate and onerous Hours of Service regulations? Case in point: innovative new Advanced Scheduling technologies offered by supply chain management solution providers.

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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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Safety and Freshness in the Food Supply Chain

The Network Effect

Recently, the CDC has reported an outbreak of 84 cases of E.coli across 19 states due to food safety issues. The post Safety and Freshness in the Food Supply Chain appeared first on The Network Effect.

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China-US Trade War and its Effects on US Distributors

EazyStock

You’ve likely heard by now about the looming trade war between the US and China. But what exactly is a trade war? How did it come about, and how will it affect American manufacturers and distributors? Read on for a look as to how industries will be affected and what measures you can take to protect your business. What is a trade war? A trade war is basically a back-and-forth dispute between two nations where a country will impose tariffs to restrict trade.

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Why a Cashmere Sweater Can Cost $2,000 — or $30

Supply Chain Brain

Made from the softest wool produced by certain breeds of goats, such as the Zalaa Ginst white goat and Tibetan Plateau goat, cashmere was once reserved for the wealthiest fashionistas. (Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife helped popularize the fabric.) But over the past two decades, its cachet skyrocketed and cheaper garments flooded the market. Nearly $1.4bn of cashmere garments were exported globally in 2016, up from $1.2bn in 2010, according to United Nations trade data.

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How Digitalization Holds the Key to Retail and Consumer Goods Success

The Network Effect

Dave Allen, a supply chain thought leader with a history of transforming supply chains at major consumer goods companies, share. The post How Digitalization Holds the Key to Retail and Consumer Goods Success appeared first on The Network Effect.

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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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‘Try Before You Buy’: A Huge Logistics Challenge for E-Tailers

Supply Chain Brain

The mantra today is “try before you buy.” What it amounts to is enabling a type of customer behavior that has caused apparel sellers headaches for years. It all dates back to the heyday of catalog sales, when customers would order more sizes or styles than they intended to keep, try them on, then send back the unwanted items. Retailers were forced to cope with large volumes of returns, becoming experts in the art of reverse logistics.

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How Crowdsourcing Can Help to Assess Financial Risk

Supply Chain Brain

Over the years, the concept of the wisdom of crowds has been applied to any number of predictive efforts, from sports and entertainment to economic trends. Now it has emerged as a tool for assessing the financial stability of suppliers and other supply-chain partners. The concept is embodied in a financial-risk score known as FRISK, developed by CreditRiskMonitor.

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Amazon Might Not Take on Drug Supply Chain Afterall, Report Suggests

Supply Chain Brain

The report on Monday by CNBC said little about whether Amazon would ultimately enter the broader retail prescription-drug market, but the idea that the online giant might not take on one segment of the supply chain was enough to send shares of pharmacies and drug distributors surging. Bloomberg has previously reported that Amazon’s health efforts have been mostly focused on selling basic medical supplies to physician offices and hospitals.

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Robot Managers: The Future of Work or a Step Too Far?

Supply Chain Brain

Not so, according to one Canadian company, which has automated many management and administrative processes to such an extent that it does not have a human resources department. Klick, a digital agency of 700 people, achieved this with an internal operating system that tracks things like billable hours, workflow and employee attendance, as well as managing recruitment and training.

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The Evolution of Control Towers to Command Centers

Are fragmented control towers hindering your supply chain’s growth and response time? Attempting to manage disruptions through various departmental control towers with basic analytic overlays hinders agility and, ultimately, your resiliency. Today’s volatile landscape requires inherent visibility across your entire value chain and the ability to orchestrate course corrections within a unified platform.

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Coffee Shops Are Already Running Out of America's Newest Milk Craze

Supply Chain Brain

It’s called oat milk, and baristas love its light, hearty flavor that lets the java beans take center stage. As more consumers choose plant alternatives to dairy, it’s gotten so popular that just in the last month, some coffee shops were left without oat milk for days, even weeks. To meet demand, producer Oatly Inc. is working with its manufacturing partners to increase output by 50 percent by this summer, said Mike Messersmith, general manager for U.S. operations, which are based in New York.

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‘Balancing Green’: What’s the Cost of Sustainability?

Supply Chain Brain

The debate over green supply chains often breaks down into extreme positions with no prospect for compromise. Some push for sustainability at any cost. Others argue that any green measures are a threat to jobs and corporate profits. It’s clear, though, that a more nuanced approach is necessary if companies are to make any progress on the issue at all.

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Will Blockchain Breathe New Life Into Legacy Systems?

The Network Effect

Enterprise software systems have been around seemingly forever. Will Blockchain finally kill them… or give them a new lease of. The post Will Blockchain Breathe New Life Into Legacy Systems? appeared first on The Network Effect.

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Forget the Trade War — China Wants to Win the Computing Arms Race

Supply Chain Brain

Chinese universities and U.S. technology companies such as International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are racing to develop quantum computers, a type of processing that’s forecast to be so powerful it can transform how drug-makers, agriculture companies and auto manufacturers discover compounds and materials. Quantum computing uses the movement of subatomic particles to process data in amounts that modern computers can’t handle.

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The Key to Sustainable Energy Optimization: A Data-Driven Approach for Manufacturing

Speaker: Kevin Kai Wong, President of Emergent Energy Solutions

In today's industrial landscape, the pursuit of sustainable energy optimization and decarbonization has become paramount. ♻️ Manufacturing corporations across the U.S. are facing the urgent need to align with decarbonization goals while enhancing efficiency and productivity. Unfortunately, the lack of comprehensive energy data poses a significant challenge for manufacturing managers striving to meet their targets. 📊 Join us for a practical webinar hosted by Kevin Kai Wong of Emergent Ene

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Robots Are Taking Over the E-Commerce Warehouse

Supply Chain Brain

Lior Elazary, chief executive officer of inVia Robotics , is entirely comfortable with stating that “robots are taking over the supply chain.” But that doesn’t preclude a continuing role for humans, he says. At least for now. The need to automate the fulfillment of e-commerce orders in particular is driving the use of robotics in the warehouse, he said.

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How Fulfillment Technology Is Keeping Pace With 'Fast Fashion'

Supply Chain Brain

It’s been used to refer to apparel makers who swap out their collections at a much more rapid rate than in the past. No longer are they satisfied with two or three seasons a year. Now it’s a dozen or more, and if a shopper puts off buying an item, there’s a strong chance that it won’t be there a week or two later. That’s still the case with many lines of clothing today, but “fast” now has an additional meaning.

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Workers at Risk As Robots Set to Replace 66 Million Jobs, Report Warns

Supply Chain Brain

A new report by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development found that the most vulnerable — one in seven workers on average across the 32 countries studied — were less likely to be receiving help than those whose jobs were more secure. The OECD said 14 percent of jobs in developed countries were highly automatable, while a further 32 percent of jobs were likely to experience significant changes to the way they were carried out.

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Amazon Go and the Future of Sentient Buildings: An Analysis

Supply Chain Brain

When it comes to disruption of business as usual for supply chains, Amazon towers above the rest. They are often spoken about by competitors with a combination of reverence and fear. Amazon has achieved their almost mythic status by continually innovating at a pace that others find hard to keep up with. They have continually upped the ante on ease-of-use, selection, rapid delivery and the overall user experience.

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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.