General SCM > Business Strategy Alignment | SupplyChainBrain

Business Strategy Alignment: Page 524

A New Study on Supply-Chain Risk

ImpactFactor recently completed a study on supply-chain risk, surveying managers of more than 100 companies. The results were not encouraging. According to managing director Bill McBeath, many companies don't consider proactive risk-management to be a strategic tool. He was "shocked" at how level their level of investment in that area was, with half reporting expenditures of $50,000 or less to audit and assess suppliers. "Not a single one spent more than $3m," he says. "Given the huge potential impact [of risk] on their shares, we believe companies are seriously under-investing."

Transportation Management Tech Advances Create BI, Enable Cross-Functional Integration

Analyst Insight: Shippers have made great advances in transportation management in the last decade by centralizing procurement and transportation planning organizations, as well as investing in TMS. The question now is: What's the next big thing? As the use of supply chain technology and information sharing grows, there is an increase in the meaningful use of information and integrating transportation with other functions. These areas have already demonstrated significant benefits for pioneering shippers and are clearly breakthroughs in transportation management. - Bill Loftis, principal, Tompkins International

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Risk Management: It's All About The Supply Chain

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Opportunities Driving Product Lifecycle Management Forward

Analyst Insight: For as long as we can remember, product lifecycle management technology has evolved in an incremental way, absorbing and exploiting new technologies as they've come along and steadily gaining in capability to meet the challenges of multi-organisation product development efforts and supply chains. Currently, the PLM solutions industry is being subjected to a looming confluence of pressures that represents both a major challenge to established approaches and a substantial opportunity for harnessing new technologies to drive further benefit. - Tony Christian, principal analyst, Cambashi

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The Cloud's Message Continues to Evolve

Analyst Insight: In recent years, Software as a Service and hosted solutions have made some significant in-roads in the supply chain application space, but their success has been somewhat limited. Continuing IT budget and resource constraints are causing many firms to take a serious look at on-demand supply chain applications. And software vendors have responded by increasing the number and variety of services provided. This mixture is expanding the horizon of on-demand supply chain IT solutions. - Tom Singer, principal, Tompkins International

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Forging a Risk-Tolerant Supply Chain

Research Available on Plant Excellence Through More Effective Plant Operations

Wouldn't You Retailers Like to Know Specifically How Much Stuff Will Be Returned?

Insight vs. Oversight Governance

Analyst Insight: Signing a contract and getting the business ramped up is just the beginning of an outsourcing deal. The real work is shaping the relationship and making the parties operate not only as a high-performance team, but also to allow the companies to embrace the dynamic nature of business and keep the parties aligned as "business happens." It's essential to have a flexible and cooperative governance framework. - Kate Vitasek, faculty of the University of Tennessee's Center for Executive Education, and founder, Supply Chain Visions

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Is 2012 The Year of Supply Chain Excellence for Pharma and Bio-Tech Industry?

Analyst Insight: Recently, Big Pharma went through a significant period of mergers and acquisitions to gain a global market presence and product offering expansion. Now it appears the tides may be shifting. A segment of Big Pharma is shedding non-core business units and focusing on core profitability. But the acquisition strategy is not dead. These diverging paths are both focused on increasing flexibility and profitability to adapt to market uncertainty. Supply chain planning and adaptability have moved forward as integration of business units has increased in all regions of the globe. - Brian Hudock, partner, Tompkins International

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Dow Chemical Beefs Up Supply-Chain Resiliency: Case Study

Small, Mid-Sized Businesses Begin to See Value in Cloud-Based BI Solutions, Study Finds

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