Tag Archives: Business

Two thirds of buyers not managing supply chain risk effectively

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Almost two thirds of buyers think their organisations are not managing their supply chain risk effectively.

Responding to a mini-poll held during a webinar organised by Supply Management in association with business information publisher Bureau van Dijk, 63 per cent of listeners said they didn’t believe their organisations managed threats in the best way.

Ted Datta, BvD’s strategic account director – London, said a majority of negative response underlined the increasing awareness among companies and buyers of the key importance of good supplier risk management. This was increasingly important because legislation was covering new and wider areas, said Datta.

“Know your suppliers, business partners and third parties,” he said, emphasising buyers needed to be up-to-date with new risks as situations changed every month. Datta said as there was so much information to monitor, companies could segment their supply base to identify key strategic suppliers and monitor those suppliers ‘in real time’ or as frequently as possible depending on their resources. Others could be reviewed in a more structured way, he said.

David Lyon, head of procurement at Cancer Research UK, told the webinar, Enhanced supplier due diligence: the implications for supplier risk management, reputation was vital for a charity and it had to ensure suppliers were aligned with its core purpose. “As an organisation that spends 80 per cent of every pound donated on our core mission of research, we must work hand in hand with all our suppliers,” he said.

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The Next Revolution in Supply Chain Management

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In the first revolution, the concept of supply chain, as opposed to logistics, was put forth. Constraint based optimization tools for the extended supply chain were developed to support the new philosophy. As this was going on, Lean and Six Sigma approaches to improving capabilities, not just at the factory level, but in other internal departments, as well as across the supplier and 3PL base, were gaining in strength.

It took a while, but it was recognized technology was not enough. The key process in SCM is the sales and operations planning (S&OP) process that balances supply with demand intelligently. S&OP itself is going through a second rev and we now talk about integrated business planning (IBP), a form of S&OP that is more closely aligned with finance. A related “revolution” that improves the demand half of S&OP is based on the concept of demand driven supply chains; this is the idea that it is important to not just create a forecast based on historical shipments, but having real visibility to demand at the point of sale to improve demand management.

In recent years, the topic of supply chain risk management has emerged and new processes and ideas have begun to be codified and turned into a distinct discipline. An emerging topic is supply chain sustainability; and indeed in many corporate social responsibility reports the topics of both supply chain risk management and sustainability are addressed.

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Could Your Supply Chain Be The Weakest Link In Risk Management?

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Supply chains are a vital component of every organization’s global business operations and the backbone of today’s global economy. However, security chiefs everywhere are concerned about how open they are to an abundance of risk factors. A range of valuable and sensitive information is often shared with suppliers and, when that information is shared, direct control is lost. This leads to an increased risk of its confidentiality, integrity or availability being compromised.

Data Protection

Security is only as strong as its weakest link. Despite organizations’ best efforts to secure intellectual property and other sensitive information, limited progress has been made in effectively managing information risk in the supply chain. Too often data breaches trace back to compromised vendor credentials to access the retailer’s internal networks and supply chain. Mapping the flow of information and keeping an eye on key access points will unquestionably remain crucial to building a more resilient information.

Take a moment and think about this: Do you know if your suppliers are protecting your company’s sensitive data as diligently as you would protect it yourself? This is one obligation you can’t outsource because, in the end, it’s your liability. By looking at the structure of your supply chains, determining what information is shared and accessing the probability and impact of potential breaches, you can balance information risk management efforts across your enterprise.

Organizations need to think about the consequences of a supplier providing accidental, but harmful, access to their corporate data. Information shared in the supply chain can include intellectual property, customer-to-employee data, commercial plans or negotiations and logistics. Caution should not be confined to manufacturing or distribution partners. It should also embrace professional services suppliers, all of whom share access, often to your most valuable assets.

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Zara’s Agile Project Management Advantage

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Zara is a fast fashion retailer that has achieved staggering success since its inception in 1975. Compared to its Zara peers in retail, Zara has one practice that helps contribute to its competitive advantage: an agile project management oriented supply chain.

Agile Project Management
Broadly, agile project management is based on the 12 principles brought forth by the agile manifesto. This manifesto forms the basis for a project management theory that focuses on iterations, adaptations, collaboration, and constant improvement. As opposed to many other project management designs, agile project management is a non-linear approach to problem solving that hopes to provide flexibility and adaptability, without having to go back to the start with each iteration undertaken.

While originally developed for software and technology problem solving, agile project management has gained acceptance in the supply chain industry for its ability to help companies adapt to market dynamics. In the same way agile project management helps a software company develop non-linear solutions to problems, agile project management allows a supply chain to creatively adapt to market evolutions without having to disrupt supply chains from start to finish. Zara has used this agile supply chain to earn a distinct and unmatched advantage in retail.

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Preventing a talent gap in supply chain management

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When you hear about skills shortages and talent gaps, the discussion tends to surround STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — professions. However, a new concern also is breaking through.

Supply chain management has become a far more complex and skill-demanding ordeal for businesses in a wealth of industries operating in virtually every location around the globe. This has been driven by the fact that commodities markets, global trade and regional economic conditions have been volatile at best, and show no signs of simplifying or stabilizing anytime soon, meaning that managers of the supply chain have a lot more variables to worry about today than in the past.

Thankfully, it appears as though many businesses, including those operating within the manufacturing sector, are working to nip this problem in the bud by providing their own types of training for supply chain managers to digest. After all, the greatest weapon in the fight against any talent gap is increased investment from the private sector in training and development, and this medicine appears to be more commonly embraced in the modern era.

Automotive excellence
Manufacturing Business Technology magazine recently reported that a new study from DHL revealed automotive giants are likely to face what it calls a “perfect storm” that will wreak havoc on supply chains from around the globe. According to the study, supply chain management professionals, specifically those looking to get a job at an automotive manufacturing firm, already are few and far between, and this problem is expected to become more complex in the near future.

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Secrets To Success: How Supply Chain Services Tripled Its Business

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Five years ago, Chip Emery, a retired big-business CEO, bought a small-time, 8-year-old reseller startup, Supply Chain Services.

At the time, the bar-coding VAR was profitable, with $9 million a year in revenue, but Emery, the owner and CEO of the company, simplified the business. Five years later, the company has just come off its most profitable year in its history, pulling in $25 million in revenue, and is set to make an additional $30 million this year.

So what radical changes did he make to drastically grow the company? Well, as Emery said, it was really quite simple. He just had the company focus on what it did well.

“One thing that we did when I bought it was to focus on where our expertise is,” Emery said.

“I learned very quickly that our expertise was in warehouse, distribution and manufacturing, so I made the leap of faith and decided, ‘Why don’t we focus on what we know and stop talking about selling to hospitals and municipal government, and point-of-sale equipment in the retail world, and health care? Let’s just stop all that stuff.”

Emery had the Minneapolis-based company focus its energy on just three major markets, as he said you can only do two or three things really well at the same time. If you try to take on more than that, you’re taking on too much, he said.

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Managing the Financial Supply Chain

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Managing the Financial Supply Chain

Manufacturers devote considerable time and resources to managing their physical supply chain, but often it’s their financial supply chain that needs the most attention. As costs continue to escalate, managing cash and capital is just as important as managing relationships among supply chain partners. And in many cases, the integration between the physical and the financial supply chain is such that any weak links in one of the chains will threaten the vitality of both chains.

By way of definition, “the financial supply chain refers to the transactions that occur between trading partners that facilitate the purchase of, and payment for, goods and services, such as sending purchase orders and invoices, and making payment,” explains Scott Pezza, senior research associate with analyst firm Aberdeen Group.

Just as finance involves much more than just “bean counting,” the financial supply chain represents the actual lifeblood of an organization, as it provides the cash flow needed to ensure the doors are kept open, the lights are kept on, the employees are being paid and products are being made and shipped.

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How Do You Turn Supply Chain Data into Actionable Information?

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How Do You Turn Supply Chain Data into Actionable Information?

There is a continuum in terms of presentation of data that allows for continuous sophistication in understanding and interpreting data. There are lots of ways to view data, but three that are particularly useful in supply-chain analytics are –Reporting, Scorecarding, and Benchmarking.

The simplest form of looking at data is what we have all seen dozens of times, we call it “Reporting”. Back in the day, reporting was numbers printed out on green bar paper, but today’s business intelligence reports are far more detailed and dynamic than in the past. For instance, a BI report of today displays all the data about transportation providers as usable information, in a scorecard format. Factors such as on-time delivery, freight cost per unit shipped, and transit time are assigned metrics and weighted averages to help users determine how well carriers are performing overall.

Operation managers and executives who want a quick, daily overview of what is happening in their transportation or supply chain network use dashboards to provide information in near real-time to help users understand what is happening within their network, and allows them to make proactive decisions to remedy problems as they occur. Where reporting is really like looking in the rearview mirror, dashboards are used to see what’s going on now, and makes it easier for users to identify trends and exceptions, and to intervene before something goes wrong.

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Leverage cloud financial intelligence systems with AWS

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Leverage cloud financial intelligence systems with AWS

The use of cloud financial intelligence systems, typically from cloud financial management system providers, offers insights into cloud usage. Cloud financial management providers, such as Cloud Cruiser and others, can tell you how effective the cloud platforms are in delivery of services. This includes how each service tracks back to cloud resources that support the services, as well as who is consuming the services and by how much.

However, the true value of these systems is not the simple operational cost data that they are able to gather and report on — it’s the ability to leverage deeper analytics to determine usage patterns, and how those patterns will behave over time. This means you have the ability to better understand how your AWS instances (and other cloud services) were put to use in the past, and more importantly, how they will be leveraged in the future, including the ability to properly estimate cloud resource utilization in the context of complex and widely distributed architectures.

It’s all about the ability to make the most out of data from multiple components of the architecture, not just AWS. Most enterprises that deploy cloud-based systems do so using either public and private clouds within a multi-cloud architecture, which may also be mixed with traditional (or legacy) systems. This makes the financial tracking much more complex, but also much more valuable.

For example, a production management system may leverage core storage services from AWS, session management services from their OpenStack private cloud and core database services using a traditional Oracle database running in their data center. Thus, the cloud financial management system needs to gather information for many different system components, including the private and public clouds , as well as the local database. System owners can use this information to determine the amount of resources consumed, as well as patterns of consumption over time. They have a complete picture as to how a holistic system is functioning, including cloud and non-cloud components.

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10 BPM tools every manager needs to know

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10 BPM tools every manager needs to know

Managing business performance is everyone’s everyday job. You could argue that making sure the business is performing well is THE job of any manager. The challenge is that there are many different tools available to mange business performance, here I want to look at 10 popular BPM tools that every manager should know.

1. Planning and budgeting

This is probably the most widely used BPM approach in businesses by which plan ahead and set budgets for the following year. This is traditionally done annually where organisation set goals for the next 12 months and negotiate a budget to achieve the goals.

2. Key performance indicators (KPIs)

KPIs are the navigation instruments that companies use to understand whether they are on track or veering off the prosperous path.

3. Balanced scorecard (BSC)

The BSC is another popular management tool that has been designed to articulate the strategic objectives of a business and then align performance measures and action plans to these strategic objectives to ensure the strategy gets executed.

4. Benchmarking

Companies use benchmarking to compare their own performance with those of others. Benchmarking is traditionally seen as comparing your own performance with external best-practice performance (where best practice performance can come from outside the sector or industry a company operates in).

5. Business excellence model

The business excellence models come from the quality movement and have been developed by national bodies to assess quality standards in companies. There are various national standards that are often used as the basis for quality awards.

6. Enterprise risk management (ERM)

ERM represents a set of tools and approaches to identify, assess and manage corporate risks. While risk management started its life very much as an internal control back-room function, today it has moved up onto the boardroom agendas of most businesses.

7. Six sigma

The six sigma is a tool that was pioneered by Motorola in the late 1980s and later adopted very successfully by global giants such as General Electric and Honeywell as well as many other companies of various sizes.

8. Performance dashboards

Most organisations today are bursting with data, metrics, reports and analyses. Dashboards provide single-page at-a-glance overviews of areas of performance (eg corporate overview, sales, finance, HR, business units, etc).

9. Customer relationship management (CRM)

Most companies want to make sure they not only have satisfied customers but that they turn their customers into profitable and loyal customers.

10. Performance appraisals

Another popular performance management tools is the performance appraisal. It is basically a tool to assess job performance of individuals in a company.

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