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Companies leaning heavily on global sourcing? Theyre feeling the heat most, as sudden trade policy curveballs throw procurement plans into chaos. manufacturer I know saw their import costs jump overnight, forcing a rethink of a decade-old sourcingstrategy. What Is Agile Procurement?
The manufacturing sector is facing unprecedented volatility in global trade, with tariffs becoming the latest in a series of uncertainty drivers that are impacting virtually all industries. Manufacturing plants are deeply entrenched; tied to infrastructure, suppliers, skilled labor, and regulatory requirements.
Treating suppliers as essential partners in the field of direct spend management—almost like customers—can be a key component of a successful company strategy. Access to Unique Process and Asset Capabilities: Some suppliers offer unique skills, technologies, or processes that are not available in-house or through other sources.
A data gateway is essentially a connective tissue across your supply chain, providing unified access to supply chain data from various sources, including enterprise systems, data feeds, data warehouses, data lakes, data marts, and business entities. Achieving these goals requires visibility into the entire supply chain.
Speaker: Rod Robinson - SVP of the Supplier Diversity Practice, Insight Sourcing Group
Supplier diversity programs are impactful and effective tools in your business strategy because they guarantee a diverse supplier base and ensure inclusivity within your ultimate procurement plan.
When you talk to companies that have implemented enterprise or supply chain applications, executives will usually admit that they have under-invested in training and preparing users to use the new technology. The most common form of trading partner collaboration is purchase order collaboration. Training is critical.
Reducing cost was the primary objective, and most operational decisionsfrom sourcing to fulfillmentreflected that mindset. Resilience is the ability to respond to disruption while maintaining core operations, and more companies are shifting their strategies accordingly. For years, supply chains were engineered to be lean.
” Traditional planning models optimize functional processes to improve cost and customer service. For example, if I improve the cost structure in transportation, procurement, manufacturing and sales independently, what decision support framework decides the right trade-offs? You are right. What should we do?
Fragmented systems, rising cost pressures, and shifting risk profiles are making it harder than ever to manage procurement effectively. Strategies that worked just a few years ago are now too rigid, manual, or disconnected to keep up. How do you begin developing a procurementstrategy?
Explore the most common use cases for network design and optimization software. Scenario analysis and optimization defined. Optimizing your supply chain based on costs and service levels. Optimizing your supply chain based on costs and service levels. Diversifying sourcing and manufacturing. What's inside?
a leading global supplier of mechanical components for the manufacturing industry headquartered in Japan. The manufacturing and supply chain industries are rapidly evolving and increasingly volatile, fueled by shifts in global tariff and trade policy, geopolitical uncertainty, logistics disruptions, and technology developments.
Scaling manufacturing operations is crucial for business growth but presents unique challenges. Balancing increased demand with consistent quality and controlled costs is difficult but essential for manufacturers looking to expand. Successfully scaling manufacturing requires more than just adding resources.
Optimizing fulfillment requires a series of steps to get a shipment from its source to the end customer. These steps include sourcing and receiving inventory, storing inventory, order processing, picking and packing an order, shipping the order, and returns management.
For senior leaders, understanding and integrating the three pillars of sustainability—environmental, social, and economic—into supply chain strategies is essential. Transportation, warehousing, and manufacturing collectively contribute significantly to carbon emissions, making these areas critical for meaningful change.
Speaker: Olivia Montgomery, Associate Principal Supply Chain Analyst
The supply chain management techniques that dominated the last 30 years are no longer supporting consumer behavior or logistics and manufacturing capabilities. Procurementstrategies in response to network delays and bottlenecks. Curious to know how your peers are navigating ongoing disruption? So what’s working now?
A data gateway is essentially a connective tissue across your supply chain, providing unified access to supply chain data from various sources, including enterprise systems, data feeds, data warehouses, data lakes, data marts, and business entities. Achieving these goals requires visibility into the entire supply chain.
But between rising costs, complex logistics, and the constant struggle to optimize space and labor, staying ahead can feel like an uphill battle. That’s where warehouse optimization comes in. Here’s what you can expect: A clear definition of warehouse optimization and its core components. Ready to get started?
Home Introducing Freightos Enterprise: End-to-End Procurement, Benchmarking, and Management Freightos Enterprise unifies market intelligence, tender management, and shipment operations into one solution, enhancing logistics efficiency for large import-export businesses.
(TSX: KXS) an end-to-end supply chain orchestration, today announced a new partnership that will deliver improved alignment of supply chain plans with business objectives and strategies for midmarket discrete manufacturing companies. Were thrilled to partner with Infor to help manufacturers be more agile and resilient in the long term.
They integrate AI into demand forecasting, inventory optimization, and logistics operations to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and mitigate risks. This enables companies to adjust sourcing, production, and logistics well in advance of potential disruptions.
The modern supply chain is a complex network of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and customers, all interconnected and reliant on a shared ecosystem of trust and accountability. Ethical sourcing entails: Labor Practices: Ensuring fair wages, safe working conditions, and compliance with local and international labor laws.
Factors like automation, massive investments in at-scale, fit-for-purpose technologies, specialized training, low labor rates, and effective demand and supply planning capabilities, have woven themselves like threads into the fabric of efficient global manufacturing ecosystems. Batteries are sourced from South Korea and China.
Datacenter Hardware: The demand for powerful computing to train ever larger and more accurate AI models is insatiable. AWS , Google , and Microsoft are also investing heavily in custom AI chips to reduce their dependence on NVIDIA and optimize performance and cost. This puts pressure on other device manufacturers to follow suit.
Automotive Supply Chain: Production Shifts and Border Congestion The North American auto industry is among the largest impacted, as Mexico occupies a significant role in parts manufacturing and vehicle assembly. auto parts are sourced from Mexico, making the tariff impact immediate and severe. Approximately 40% of U.S.
Running a manufacturing business isn’t easy. That’s where a manufacturing ERP comes in. Manufacturing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software integrates all your core business processes into one powerful platform. This prevents stockouts, reduces waste from overstocking, and optimizes your warehouse operations.
In an era where the threat of supply chain disruptions is constant, reshoring manufacturing has become a strategic imperative for manufacturers worldwide. Additionally, the desire to shorten supply chains and improve responsiveness to customer demands is encouraging more manufacturers to explore reshoring.
A term once prominent in supply discussions optimization isn’t heard quite as often as it used to be. That doesn’t mean optimization isn’t as important now as it has been in the past. Also, validated financial statements are key in the underlying optimization models. ” What is Supply Chain Optimization?
From raw material sourcing to logistics and regulatory compliance, stakeholders across the value chain will need to prepare for structural adjustments. Sourcing and Ingredient Availability A central impact of this policy is the need to replace synthetic colorants with natural alternatives.
On the positive side, companies such as a small manufacturer of advanced plastic components used across various sectors, such as medical, industrial, automotive and consumer products has experienced increased interest from clients eager to purchase American-made goods. Where do industrial companies focus to prepare for tariffs?
Strategic sourcing and innovative solutions are often viewed as two distinct procurement tools, but they should not be seen in isolation. Think of them as apples and gearseach essential and effective on its own, yet when combined; they create a formidable mechanism for achieving procurement excellence.
The ability to drill down into this data at multiple levels ensures that sustainability measures are implemented and optimized for various supply chain segments. Since many organizations currently purchase carbon offsets, they can easily define the carbon cost of avoided emissions by translating the price of offsetting.
Procurement and supply chain management are often used interchangeably—but in practice, the lines between them can blur in ways that create real friction. Misaligned priorities, siloed systems, and unclear ownership can directly impact key performance indicators like cost savings percentage and procurement cycle time.
Traditionally, companies focus on the use of enterprise data — orders and shipments, which usually has a two- to four-week demand latency (the time from channel purchase to order receipt) and a 2-to 3-month market latency (the time from the market trigger to the translation into an order). Outsourced manufacturing had a bullwhip of 8-9.
In alignment with its end-to-end supply chain strategy, Blue Yonder will now be able to assist its customers in automating the collection and exchange of shipment data from logistics suppliers, facilitating accredited and traceable emissions calculations across all transportation modes, including air, inland (truck, rail, barge), and sea.
In May 2025, one in seven home-purchase agreements fell through resulting in the cancellation of 56,000 purchase contracts. Supply chain was defined in 1982 as interoperability between source, make and deliver. The concept was that managing trade-offs and optimizing the whole to drive business outcomes would improve value.
Automotive: Can JIT manufacturing survive legal disruptions to tariff policy? Automakers must model dual-path sourcingstrategies and reintroduce buffer inventory—not just for parts, but for regulatory flexibility. They should also adopt rolling sourcing contracts with dynamic pricing clauses based on tariff exposure.
This article outlines key factors driving supply chain change, the limitations of outdated strategies, and how Walmart is restructuring its supply chain using AI and automation. Just-in-time (JIT) inventory models, lean supplier networks, and offshore manufacturing reduced expenses but left companies exposed to disruptions.
As preposterous as this thought experiment seems, it is the reality of procurement departments in manufacturing firms across the United States. Worse yet, their responsibilities are far more important than purchasing a pair of sporty sneakers. To manufacturing professionals, this may seem natural, even inevitable.
They offer software systems and technology for complex integration, rapid application development, and advanced analytics and sell those solutions to companies that need to accelerate optimized business outcomes. Further, each product a manufacturer produces usually has different end-to-end supply chain partners.
Now for the Do’s & Don’ts In the dynamic world of FMCG, your Route to Market (RTM) strategy and distributor partnerships can make or break your brand’s success. Do Invest in Distributor Capability Building : Provide training, digital tools, and performance incentives. Digital visibility enhances agility and decision-making.
CLM changed its name twenty years ago to the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) to be more inclusive of the source, plan, and make aspects of supply chain management. While we have end-to-end transactional processes (order to cash and procure-to-pay), there is no end-to-end planning solution. What is the fog?
They emphasized being an Industry Cloud Complete Company with industry-specific solutions for over 2000 micro verticals across Process Manufacturing, Distribution, Service Industries, and Discrete Manufacturing. Industry-specific content is available for processes like Source to Settle, Procure to Pay, Order to Cash, and more.
That’s the power of manufacturing data collection. Manufacturing data collection is your secret weapon for boosting efficiency, cutting waste, and staying ahead of the competition. Manufacturing data collection is your secret weapon for boosting efficiency, cutting waste, and staying ahead of the competition.
Planners are uniquely positioned with an end-to-end focus, from procurement of materials, through manufacturing and engineering, to the movement, storage, and delivery of finished products or services. Supply chain planners are now frequently tasked with initiating transformations to address these various pressures.
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