Author Archives: Teddy Nee

ONE Blockchain Platform to Provide Enhanced Transparency and Security for Supply Chains

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One Network Enterprises, the global provider of a multi-party digital network platform, today announced a new, flexible and cross-industry Chain-of-Custody solution built on its Real Time Value Network (RTVN).

By providing serialization and tracking across complex supply chains that involve multiple parties and hand-offs, this latest offering leverages the powerful capabilities of Blockchain to help mitigate threats such as product diversion, counterfeiting, grey market distribution, spoilage, substandard products, and unauthorized introductions.

“The global implications of substandard, falsified, and counterfeit and substandard products are huge,” said Ranjit Notani, CTO of One Network.

“While some of the compromises in traditional Blockchain solutions must make the difficult choice between confidentiality, single-version-of-the-truth, and a lack of scalability, ONE Blockchain is fully integrated into One Network’s global fulfillment backbone offering a completely secure application with fine-grained confidentiality at all levels, while maintaining a single, trusted record for every transaction without requiring any expensive integration into supply chain operations.”

The new Chain-of-Custody solution was developed to deal with the realities of today’s supply chains where end-to-end serialization – from raw materials to consumers and beyond – is not an all or nothing proposition.

Accordingly, the solution is designed to increase the lengths of chain-of-custody segments until the segments merge to form a full end-to-end secure chain.

The Chain-of-Custody solution supports serial tracking, lot tracking, hybrid tracking, lot splitting, tracking through consolidation and deconsolidation, tracking through blending and discrete mixing, hierarchical IoT operations, partial chains-of-custody, and targeted recalls.

Read more at ONE Blockchain Platform to Provide Enhanced Transparency and Security for Supply Chains

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How LLamasoft Is Designing Success For Customers’ Supply Chains

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Ann Arbor, Michigan-based supply chain design software business LLamasoft is considered one of the fastest growing technology companies in North America. The company was founded by Don Hicks and Toby Brzoznowski in the late 1990s, and offers a number of innovative solutions that help some of the world’s best-known brands make smarter, faster decisions about their supply chain operations.

Its flagship software, Supply Chain Guru, is used for optimizing and simulating supply chain network operations and modeling potential changes based on performance, costs and risks. Last year, LLamasoft released Supply Chain Guru X, the newest generation of its software, which enables companies to build living models of their end-to-end supply chains. Customers can easily visualize inefficiencies, optimize for significant improvements in cost, service and risk, and test hundreds of potential scenarios for continuous supply chain improvement and innovation. Also released was Demand Guru, a new solution that empowers companies to improve their supply chain design and strategic business initiatives by incorporating powerful causative demand modeling.

In 2012, LLamasoft raised $6 million in funding, led by MK Capital. Nike also became a strategic investment partner that year, taking a minority share in October. Jumping forward to 2015, LLamasoft had a big year – acquiring IBM’s LogicTools supply chain applications business, raising $50 million in Series B funding from Goldman Sachs to fund expansion and R&D, and acquiring South Africa-based Barloworld.

Several months ago, TPG Capital, the investment group behind companies like Uber, McAfee and Airbnb, invested over $200 million in LLamasoft after seeing great promise in the company and fully understanding the value its technology delivers to customers.

Today, LLamasoft counts among its 700 customers companies such as Michael Kors, Land O’ Lakes, Johnson & Johnson, and Wayfair. The company estimates that it signs 30 to 40 new clients per quarter. When I asked Brzoznowski if he could share some of LLamasoft’s customer success stories, he pointed out a few recent examples of customer use cases including Michael Kors, U.S. Silica, Hewlett-Packard and Johnson & Johnson.

Read more at How LLamasoft Is Designing Success For Customers’ Supply Chains

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Supply chains in need of greater costing accuracy, study reveals

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Costing accuracy within supply chains must improve, a study by APICS and IMA has revealed.

The results of a survey found that supply chain managers agreed, on average, that the benefits of improving their costing systems exceed the investment.

When asked what prevents them from utilising current costing information, 44% of supply chain managers cited a lack of operational data. Instead, costing information is often reported in exclusively financial terms, making it more difficult to leverage.

According to respondents, the secondary and tertiary barriers to useful costing information are inadequate technology and software (39%) and a resistance to change by accounting and finance personnel (30%).

According to the report, there are three root causes of why supply chain professionals are not receiving adequate costing information:

An overreliance on external financial reporting systems:

Many organisations rely on externally-oriented financial accounting systems that employ oversimplified methods of costing products and services to produce information supporting internal business decision making.

Using outdated costing models:

Traditional cost accounting practices can no longer meet the challenges of today’s business environment, but are still used by many accountants.

Accounting and finance’s resistance to change:

With little pressure from managers who use accounting information to improve data accuracy and relevance, accountants are reluctant to promote new, more appropriate practices within their organisations.

The report details various steps supply chain professionals can take to improve costing systems within their organisations.

One strategy presented is for supply chain managers to strengthen their relationship with accounting and finance to foster greater information flow between the two departments.

Read more at Supply chains in need of greater costing accuracy, study reveals

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CPG Supply Chains are adapting to disruption, new research finds

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0Online shopping, new digital technologies, and increasing channel fragmentation are intensifying the pressures on US consumer packaged goods (CPG) supply chains.

There are clear steps CPG companies must take in order to prepare, according to a new report authored by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and commissioned by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA).

The report, ‘How CPG Supply Chains Are Preparing for Seismic Change’, highlights the top trends affecting CPG supply chains and the effect on CPG companies’ performance.

Among the issues addressed in the report: e-commerce sales growth, service-level performance, channel proliferation, network design, and cash management trends.

The report is based on the 2017 Supply Chain Benchmarking Study, a study of the US units of more than 30 leading CPG companies conducted jointly by BCG and GMA.

“It’s been a turbulent couple of years for the grocery industry, with major disruption and dislocation in the retail landscape,” commented Daniel Triot, senior director of the Trading Partner Alliance of GMA and the Food Marketing Institute.

“Despite the important performance gains in the supply chain in the past two years, CPG companies cannot be complacent. This report aims to provide guidance for CPG companies looking to harness new digital technologies and trends to support continued growth.”

Over the next two years, half the growth in North American grocery sales will come from e-commerce. But only 6% of CPG companies have a dedicated e-commerce supply chain team, and only 3% are able to fully track sales by channel.

Read more at CPG Supply Chains are adapting to disruption, new research finds

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50 Open Source Replacements for Really Expensive Software

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50 Open Source Replacements for Really Expensive Software

The “Great Recession” has businesses and consumers alike looking for ways to cut costs. That includes looking for cheaper alternatives to expensive software.

  1. Accounting: TurboCASH, Phreebooks 
  2. Business Intelligence: Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Palo BI Suite, JMagallanes, OpenReports
  3. Business Process Management: ProcessMaker 
  4. CAD: BRL-CAD, Archimedes
  5. Customer Relationship Management: Sugar Community Edition
  6. Database: MySQL, Firebird, Kexi 
  7. Desktop Publishing: Scribus
  8. E-mail/Collaboration/Groupware:  Zimbra
  9. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): OpenERP, Openbravo, ADempiere
  10. Gateway Security Appliances: Endian Firewall Community, Untangle
  11. Graphics/Drawing: Dia, Gimp, Inkscape, Paint.Net
  12. Office Productivity: OpenOffice.org, KOffice, NeoOffice, Oracle OpenOffice  
  13. Operating System: Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian 
  14. PDF Tools: PDFCreator
  15. Point of Sale: Openbravo POS, Lemon POS
  16. Project Management: OpenProj, GanttProject
  17. Speech Recognition: Simon 
  18. Video Tools: Blender, Cinelerra, OpenShot Video Editor, Kdenlive, CineFX, Avidemux
  19. Web Application Tools:  Open BlueDragon
  20. Web Site Authoring: Kompozer, NVU, Bluefish, SeaMonkey

If you have any question or opinion, feel free to send us a messageor leave your comments below

Reference: 50 Open Source Replacements for Really Expensive Software

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Announcement

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Greetings All,

In response to industry needs in utilization of captured data and through visibility functions, we will start webinars on creating value by using capturing of selected array of data as BI. This is combined with risk and performance analysis to accommodate for optimality in Operational and Strategic optimality.

 

Stay tuned,

Dr. Javad Seyed

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A Case Study on Leveraging Supply Chain Risk Management Solutions to Drive Revenue for a Leading Consumer Packaged Goods Firm

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SpendEdge, a global procurement intelligence advisory firm, has announced the release of their new ‘supply chain risk management study on the consumer packaged goods industry’. A well-known consumer packaged goods company with a considerable number of manufacturing units spread across economies was facing difficulties in identifying the potential opportunities in the market. The CPG sector client wanted to leverage the use of supply chain risk management solutions to achieve a more robust supply chain network. The consumer packaged goods client was also looking at devising an effective risk treatment plan including measures to protect the supply chain.

According to the procurement analysts at SpendEdge, “The CPG industry acts as a foundation for the modern consumer economy as it drives not only huge amounts of money into other businesses like retail and advertising but also generates a massive portion of the gross domestic profits (GDP) for countries across the globe.”

In the consumer packaged goods industry, leading firms are looking at leveraging the use of supply chain risk management solutions, as it helps them integrate several previous or ongoing initiatives, including those for business continuity and supply-chain security. Our supply chain risk management solutions assist clients in the consumer packaged goods market space to align their risk management strategies with supply chain risk exposure.

The supply chain risk management solutions offered by the experts at SpendEdge helped the consumer packaged goods client to monitor the complete process, starting from risk analysis and risk evaluation through risk management and right up to residual risk control. This helped the CPG sector client to achieve productivity and avoid sales losses.

Read more at A Case Study on Leveraging Supply Chain Risk Management Solutions to Drive Revenue for a Leading Consumer Packaged Goods Firm

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How to Measure Supply Chain Performance

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The appropriate metrics to manage and measure the success of a company’s operation vary significantly by industry, by individual company, and by the scale of the business. What does not vary, however, is the universal need of all companies to employ a well-structured, hierarchical framework to organize and manage their metrics.

The absence of a cohesive framework to house metrics greatly increases the likelihood that a company’s performance measurement system (PMS) will provide inadequate management support, and that resources will be wasted developing duplicative, unaligned and even conflicting metrics.

There are a number of well-known models and frameworks for operations, logistics and supply chain management. Two of the most prominent are the SCOR model and the Balanced Scorecard, and the interested reader is referred to these.

Figure 1 depicts an integrated hierarchical supply chain performance measurement system. The framework contains three levels (the strategic, tactical and operational), and within each level, it has both external and internal measures. In this PMS framework, it is the scale of an operation or activity that a particular metric monitors which determines its place in the hierarchy.

Figure 2 provides additional insight on how this hierarchical PMS framework works, displaying sample external and internal metrics for a distribution organization at each level of the hierarchy. The external metrics measure outputs and/or services that flow across the supply chain and evaluate some aspect of serving the customer. The internal metrics have an “inward” focus; and as shown in Figure 2, they evaluate how efficiently the overall distribution organization and each of its sub-functions operates.

Read more at How to Measure Supply Chain Performance

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How Does Your Supply Chain Resilience Rank?

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Hurricanes, earthquakes, terror and political upheaval all took a toll.

In addition, three emerging drivers of resilience have come to the forefront in recent years that are now included in the 2017 FM Global Resilience Index: the rate of urbanization, inherent cyber risk and supply chain visibility.

Resilience against events that could disrupt operations is a top priority for business executives seeking to minimize risk and maximize performance across their operations.

The ability of businesses to overcome disruptions throughout the world can make all the difference.

The FM Global Resilience Index is an annual ranking of 130 countries and territories according to their enterprise resilience to disruptive events.

Rankings are calculated as an equally weighted composite of 12 core drivers that affect the enterprise resilience of countries significantly and directly.

The historical data in this year’s index has been updated and calculated on this new basis for each of the last five years to enable valid historic comparison.

Here are the key results.

Switzerland occupies the top position in the 2017 FM Global Resilience Index. This reflects the fact that Switzerland is among the best in the world for its infrastructure and local suppliers, its political stability, control of corruption and economic productivity.

Luxembourg has risen gradually from eighth in 2013 to second in 2017, owing partly to its reduced reliance on oil for economic productivity. This reflects the continued growth in the importance of its services sector. Luxembourg enjoys a strong reputation for its financial sector, its network of service providers and its responsive, business-friendly regulations.

The country is well-placed to benefit from financial institutions that may be seeking a new home, post-Brexit, following the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union.

Read more at How Does Your Supply Chain Resilience Rank?

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Transportation Predictions That Will Shake-Up the Supply Chain Industry In 2018

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In the book, The Living Supply Chain, the authors argue that “Speeding up the supply chain is at the root of everything that is good: improved revenue, reduced working capital, higher profitability, and less obsolete inventory.

Conversely, slowing down the supply chain is at the root of everything that is bad: working capital write-offs, reduced profitability, and slowing revenues.”

To “speed” up the supply chain is to invest in change and change will come with the digital transformation of the supply chain, which is the major focus for executives in 2018.

Much change in the supply chain industry will be due to innovative technologies for digital transformations, along with the recent tax reforms (see below), and the still-current driver shortage/capacity crunch.

The digital transformation of the supply chain will change everything – for the better.

These are the innovative technologies that I predict companies must use to undergo this transformation within their supply chains:

  1. Cloud-based technology
  2. Advanced Analytics
  3. Tracking and Tracing
  4. Supply Chain Visibility
  5. Blockchain
  6. Artificial Intelligence
  7. Predictive Analytics
  8. The Internet of Things

“In 2018, shippers must embrace change in order to succeed. Waiting and seeing what will happen is no longer an option,” adds Clark.

“Transportation management systems are poised as the fundamental tool for supply chain transformation, helping businesses to position themselves above the competition with sustainable profits and better service levels.”

Read more at Transportation Predictions That Will Shake-Up the Supply Chain Industry In 2018

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