February, 2019

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How vehicle customization will drive the supply chain of the future

Kinaxis

by Dustin Mattison I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Farhan Mirza, President of BAFF Consultants Inc., to discuss vehicle customization by original equipment manufacturer (OEM) automakers and its impact on the supply chain of the future. Mirza notes that customization is a significant market trend and believes the entire supply chain will require transformation as the customization of vehicles becomes a mainstream approach to production.

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Mid-market companies leapfrogging supply chain planning maturity stages

ToolsGroup

Is the latest technology enabling some mid-market companies to leapfrog supply chain planning (SCP) stages of maturity? The evidence suggests that it is. Publicly, analysts are still cautioning mid-market companies not to aim too high. But in interviewing a number of analysts last year, I found that privately they were saying something different. Here are some of their comments: “ Even less mature companies are focused on the automation of decision making.

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Why Supply Chain Platforms?

Talking Logistics

Today, collaboration is an essential step in the digital transformation of your company, and has become vital if you expect to compete with increasingly more dynamic and connected competitors. Through this transformation, it’s no longer an option to work separate from your collaborators. Instead, a real convergence must be created by merging the processes with increased productivity, agility, efficiency, and a new customer experience in mind.

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Understanding Your Safety Stock Calculations

Demand Solutions

If you manufacture or distribute products, it's safe to assume that you have a specified safety stock level— or at least we certainly hope you do. If you're on the fence about whether or not to hold safety stock, we recommend reading up on why it's critical to overcoming variability in your supply chain. At this point, you may be saying to yourself, "but carrying excess inventory is expensive!

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Speeding Robotics Automation with AI

The $53 trillion manufacturing economy in the US is undergoing a major automation paradigm shift due to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Thanks to new practical frameworks, automation projects that were once impossible or inefficient to implement are now being fast-tracked, and robotics automation is becoming increasingly relevant to a growing number of users and scenarios.

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Meeting the Omnichannel Challenge

The Network Effect

Consumers are buying products through many different channels the consumer goods supply chain has become more complex than ever before. The post Meeting the Omnichannel Challenge appeared first on The Network Effect.

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Regaining control: Inventory management best practices (Part two)

Kinaxis

by Richard Cushing. In part one of “Regaining control: Inventory management best practices” , we talked about controlling inventory, before being able to competently manage inventory. With that in mind, let’s dive in to a few more inventory management best practices that will help you get the control you need to better manage your assets.

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Autonomous Mobile Robotics (AMR): What They Are and Benefits of Using Them

GlobalTranz

Sudden surges in warehouse demand result from increased access to retailers. The internet and mobile technology give customers the ability to become one with their shopping experiences, including e-commerce purchases and in-store experiences. The ability of a company to guarantee customer happiness lies in effective, efficient fulfillment, and the easiest way to reduce spend revolves around lowering travel time.

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Have You Given Your Planner Love Today?

Supply Chain Shaman

As I write this blog, Valentine cards scatter my desk. This is the week for love: a time to send cards and letters to those that we appreciate. I am in the middle of sending the cards to my grandchildren. It is in this spirit, that I write this post. The most unloved employees in the back office are supply chain planners. As supply chain leaders, I would encourage you to send each of them some love for Valentine’s Day.

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Logistics Experts Wanted with Joe Lynch

The Logistics of Logistics

download the audio file. [00:22] Opening / Introduction. • Hello everybody, this is Joe Lynch and welcome to The Logistics of Logistics podcast. • Our format will be a little different today, because it’s just me – usually I interview somebody from the logistics or supply chain space, but not today. • Today’s topic is “Logistics Experts Wanted”. • Before we dive into today’s topic, I want to tell you a little about my company and my podcast. [00:47] About The Logistics of Logistics. • At The Log

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Supply Chain Resilience Checklist

Strengthen your operations with the Supply Chain Resilience Checklist. This practical, easy-to-use tool helps your organization prepare for disruptions and ensure long-term continuity in an unpredictable world. Why Download: Identify and assess critical supply chain risks Ask the right questions to evaluate vendor preparedness Implement effective strategies to reduce vulnerabilities Improve communication, transparency, and coordination across your network What You’ll Learn: How to evaluate and m

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Ivalua Sees Accelerating Momentum with Another Record Year in 2018

ivalua

Growth driven by new customer acquisition, regional expansion and continued customer success. REDWOOD CITY, Feb. 12, 2019 — Ivalua, a leading provider of global Spend Management Cloud solutions, today announced another record year. Success was driven by accelerating customer acquisition, continued industry-leading customer retention rates, geographic expansion and dynamic solution innovations.

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How often do supply chain leaders assess their network for improvements?

AIMMS

Part II in our series on assessing your network design’s maturity . As we wrote in Part I of this series , we recently ran a quiz to help supply chain professionals benchmark their network design maturity. Results show that the majority of respondents use spreadsheets to support network design and consider themselves “advanced beginners” in the use of network optimization technologies.

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Regaining control: Inventory management best practices (Part one)

Kinaxis

by Richard Cushing It happens to be axiomatic that you cannot manage your inventory if you do not control your inventory. Many times, I have been told, “Our people just don’t trust the numbers they see in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Everything has to be double-checked.”. Usually, this statement is followed by some negative comment about the ERP system being unreliable.

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Automation in the Warehouse: It’s All About Capacity

GlobalTranz

Automation in the warehouse is essential to meeting the growing demand of e-commerce and the blending of traditional supply chain channels into the omnichannel supply chain. Unfortunately, warehouse capacity around the country is tight, but available capacity is only being used at rates shy of 70 percent. How can warehouse capacity be both tight and utilized less than 100 percent?

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From Curiosity to Competitive Edge: How Mid-Market CEOs Are Using AI to Scale Smarter

Speaker: Lee Andrews, Founder at LJA New Media & Tony Karrer, Founder and CTO at Aggregage

This session will walk you through how one CEO used generative AI, workflow automation, and sales personalization to transform an entire security company—then built the Zero to Strategy framework that other mid-market leaders are now using to unlock 3.5x ROI. As a business executive, you’ll learn how to assess AI opportunities in your business, drive adoption across teams, and overcome internal resource constraints—without hiring a single data scientist.

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How Technology Empowers Freight Brokers to Work Smarter, Not Harder, to Drive Profitability

Talking Logistics

Working smarter, not harder, is critical for everybody in transportation today, but it’s especially important for freight brokers in light of the increased competition in the marketplace and the ever-more demanding expectations of shippers. What does “working smarter, not harder” mean for freight brokers? What are the biggest drivers of cost and inefficiency in the industry?

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How Integrating Your ERP With Your TMS Will Make Life Easier

Kuebix

Hardly anyone will deny that technology is the future. For companies with supply chains, this means utilizing some combination of a transportation management system (TMS), enterprise resource planning system (ERP), yard management system (YMS) and warehouse management system (WMS) just to keep up with the competition! That’s a lot of different technology to manage, especially […].

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Machine Learning and the Business of Tomorrow

Enterra Insights

Most often when people discuss artificial intelligence (AI), they are discussing a subset of that field known as machine learning. Louis Columbus ( @LouisColumbus ) explains, “Enterprises are striving to find greater meaning in the massive amounts of data they generate and save every day. Machine learning is providing the needed algorithms, applications, and frameworks to bring greater predictive accuracy and value to enterprises’ data sets and contributing to diverse strategies succeeding

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How often do supply chain leaders assess their network for improvements?

AIMMS

Part II in our series on assessing your network design’s maturity . As we wrote in Part I of this series , we recently ran a quiz to help supply chain professionals benchmark their network design maturity. Results show that the majority of respondents use spreadsheets to support network design and consider themselves “advanced beginners” in the use of network optimization technologies.

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The AI Race Isn’t Just About Tech Superiority – Its the Supply Chain, Stupid!

The race to dominate AI is no longer about who has the smartest algorithms — it's about who can build and scale faster. Behind every AI breakthrough lies a battle for resources: data centers, compute hardware, power, and telecom infrastructure. And right now, even tech giants are hitting a wall. Our latest white paper reveals the six critical supply chain elements that are increasingly separating AI leaders from the rest.

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George Jetson and the case for modern supply chain planning

Kinaxis

by Mike McAllister. As a supply chain planner of a certain vintage, you remember The Jetsons and likely recall George working for Mr. Spacely at Spacely Space Sprockets. While we can’t be sure what kind of supply chain planning system Mr. Spacely had in place to produce his sprockets, The Jetsons’ well-documented ability to predict the future – from large format flatscreen televisions to video conferencing and robot vacuums – provides a key indicator.

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The Top 5 Warehouse Management Technologies Shaping the Supply Chain

GlobalTranz

New technologies are being developed that will propel warehouse management and shape the supply chain of the future. Around the globe, supply chain entities and third-party logistics providers (3PLs) are seeking out the best ways to enhance flexibility and adaptability for both inbound and outbound logistics. From the dramatic changes possible through the cloud to the applications.read More.

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The Missing Bookmark: Customer Experience vs. Expectations

Talking Logistics

Last week, at the Four Seasons resort in Orlando, I attended a meeting organized by a leading logistics service provider for its sales executives. I moderated several workshops and a fireside chat with the attendees. One of the topics that we discussed was customer experience. I showed them the chart below from a research study we conducted last March (in partnership with BluJay Solutions, a Talking Logistics sponsor) that shows how “To deliver an enhanced customer experience” is the main driver

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Design, Operating and Situational Inventory Trade-Offs

ToolsGroup

Gartner analyst Paul Lord has developed a framework to better understand inventory trade-offs by categorizing those decisions according to the objectives they are meant to achieve: structural, operational and situational. Many companies struggle with decisions such as “How many days of sales or inventory turns per year should we target? or “How can we reduce inventory and improve our balance sheet?”.

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State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025

AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.

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Optimizing the Modern Enterprise with a Control Tower for CFOs

The Network Effect

How CFOs are Leveraging Intelligent Control Towers to Align Financial and Supply Chain Decision-Making Today’s modern organization comprises a complex. The post Optimizing the Modern Enterprise with a Control Tower for CFOs appeared first on The Network Effect.

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Do More Shipping with Less Work

Shipchain

Shippers everywhere face an uncertain future. The constant threat of a trade war and increasing consumer demands have pushed existing operations to their breaking points. Customers want information and visibility at any given time, and any misstep in the supply chain could result in permanent losses to profitability, productivity, and efficiency. The situation leaves very little room for error, and unfortunately, to err is human.

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The 5 incredibly disruptive promises of concurrent planning

Kinaxis

by Alex Rotenberg “He who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass.” – Ray Dalio. Traditional supply chain planning techniques have failed. Companies are too slow to react to changes, and collaboration across silos and continuous learning options limited. We need a new approach to planning, to know sooner and act faster. Concurrent planning provides this ability to continuously and simultaneously plan, monitor and respond to changes in one single environment.

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Top 4 Reasons Effectively Implementing Supply Chain Technology Creates a Competitive Advantage

GlobalTranz

Increasing the technologies deployed in your supply chain might be a goal for your organization. Meanwhile, executives that have spent time in the industry can be fearful of how upgrading systems can impact investment strategy and other business goals. However, supply chain technology is continuing to evolve, and it can key to creating competitive advantage, especially for.read More.

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Staying Ahead of UFLPA Enforcement: Best Practices for Retail Supply Chains

Speaker: Ethan Woolley, Director at Kharon

This webinar will explore how companies can proactively address compliance risks–rather than reactively responding to–UFLPA enforcement actions. Ethan Woolley will provide insights into the latest CBP enforcement trends, entity list updates, and industries under increased scrutiny, with a look at potential shifts under the Trump administration. Ethan will also explore how predictive data and strategic due diligence can help organizations stay ahead of regulatory challenges and strengthen complia

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The Role of Emerging Technologies in Managed Transportation Services

Talking Logistics

When I ask shippers what they look for in a logistics or transportation management partner, technology capabilities — and the data and insights those technologies provide — is always near the top of the list. Of course, the technology landscape is very different today compared to 5-10 years ago, with blockchain, machine learning, real-time freight visibility, and other emerging technologies dominating the headlines.

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Which Industries will Demand Greater Logistics Capabilities in 2019

C3 Solutions

This post was originally posted on Cerasis.com and written by Adam Robinson, Marketing Manager at Cerasis.

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How to Unleash Blockchain into Your Supply Chain

Material Handling & Logistics

Blockchain-based applications provide transparency and visibility throughout the entire supply chain.