Articles
Supply Chain Management
Near Sourcing: Definition, Benefits, and Drawbacks
Near sourcing is a business strategy that has become increasingly popular in recent years. It involves shifting production and services closer to the point of sale or consumption rather than relying on global supply chains. It can offer numerous advantages such as reduced shipping costs, faster delivery times, and improved environmental sustainability; however, there are […]
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3 Ways Digital Transformation Enhances Capacity
After consecutive pandemic years, supply chains are a mess. As a result, businesses are running out of stock just as surging consumer demand drives up prices for remaining goods, contributing to record inflation and further disrupting consumer markets.
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Gaining Better Visibility: Where to Start
While the business-to-consumer (B2C) market has embraced sophisticated technology tools to enable a digital transformation across the supply chain, the business-to-business (B2B) industry has been slower to adapt, steadfast in a reliance on spreadsheets, phone calls and email.
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Agile Supply Chain: What It Is, Benefits, and Applications
Supply chains can be complex and sensitive. A company can’t survive without a supply chain because it needs everything from raw materials to the final product. Many companies have established an agile supply chain to manage supply better, move goods quickly, and deliver them on time. This process is fundamental to those who produce physical […]
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AI and ML in Retail: Help or Hype?
Top-performing retailers are bullish on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), with 71% of respondents to a Retail Systems Research report saying AI-enabled analytics will fundamentally change their merchandising forecasting by 2025.
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How to Unlock Opportunity With a Procurement Control Tower
With market volatility and sky-high inflation driving shifts in the price of oil and other commodities, it’s not surprising to see businesses adjust sourcing and inventory strategies in anticipation of future roadblocks. Plus, with consumer demand softening, many companies that largely over-indexed on orders last year are now sitting on a surplus of supply.
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Capacity Planning: Meaning, Strategies, and Process
Capacity planning is an excellent way to increase corporate productivity. Capacity planning helps you identify potential areas for growth, which boosts investment returns, and maintains good employee morale. Planning your resource capacity is helpful when you manage several projects because it improves your chances of accomplishing them on schedule and within budget. Using capacity-based planning […]
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Supply Chain Strain: How to Navigate Disruption
Now that we’ve been in a pandemic for more than two years, it’s funny to look back at our optimism at the beginning. We expected brief supply chain interruptions and thought that things would be back to normal in a few short months. Then we realized it could drag on for a year or more. But almost three years?
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Keeping the Supply Chain Running in Ukraine
Since 2020, the business landscape has been full of crises for 3PLs operating in Europe. First a worldwide pandemic, now a war between Russia and Ukraine. Keeping a supply chain operating efficiently is challenging in the best of times, but how can companies best respond during game changing disruptions? Yuriy Ostapyak, a Ukrainian-born U.S. citizen and COO for Logistics Plus joined the Inbound Logistics podcast to discuss his company’s response to these challenges.
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The Future of the Supply Chain is Cloudy
We hear a lot about the cloud these days. The cloud (public or private) refers to software and services that run on the Internet instead of locally on your computer. There is a good chance that the majority of business data will eventually reside in the cloud.
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Blanket Purchase Order: Definition, Benefits, and When to Use
A Blanket Purchase Order is a legally binding agreement between you, a buyer, and a supplier who has come to a long-term deal to deliver goods or services for a specified period. But what does that actually mean? What are the benefits of using this kind of agreement? And when is a good time to […]
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Materials Management: Definition, Process, Benefits
Materials management is an aspect of supply chain management and planning. The primary purpose of materials management is to ensure that manufacturers have all the raw materials they need to make goods. Materials management also focuses on ensuring that no components are wasted and optimizing inventory maintenance and management. While materials management requires understanding what […]
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Acing the Back-to-School Season
These stats on school supplies reveal getting straight A’s in back-to-school supply chains is a yearly test.
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“Make, Move, Sell” Companies Shift Business Models: Necessity Begets (Re)Invention
With the adage “necessity is the mother of all invention” as a guide, businesses are embracing change and cultivating innovation in response to continued supply chain turmoil.
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Supply Chain Leaders Reconfigure Distribution Networks
Given everything that has transpired across the globe over the past two years, supply chain leaders are evaluating and executing changes to their supply chain/distribution networks as well as their sourcing and manufacturing strategies.
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Inflation Innovation Stagnation
Achieving demand-driven enterprise status would have been impossible without the innovative technology-driven processes brought to bear on how we source, ship, and fulfill product, all while meeting evolving customer needs and demands.
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5 Ways to Prepare for Supply Chain Disruptions
If we’ve learned anything during the past two years, it has been about market disruptions—even to the point of the disruptions being disrupted. While accurate crystal balls are tough to come by, let’s explore five trends and how they may provide clues to solve for continued supply chain disruptions.
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Real-time Data Isn’t the Only Thing Supply Chains Are Missing
Before the polar vortex in Texas, the biggest logjams at the Port of LA, and the start of the Great Resignation, McKinsey found that major production disruptions were estimated to occur every 3.7 years. In the months since, it has become clear these incidents are far too common to be referred to as black swan […]
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How Strong Trading Relationships Help Win and Retain Customers
The most effective supply chains are built on a firm foundation of cooperation between suppliers and distributors. Strong trading relationships have a significant impact on just about every measure of performance: customer service, transportation and storage costs, risk, forecasting, lead times, and even product development. The best way to ensure that your supply chain is […]
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What’s the Word: the Language of Logistics
Load Balancing To load balance inventory means to distribute inventory across a network of warehouses with the main purpose of positioning inventory closer to the end customer prior to purchase. Retailers load balance inventory to reduce last-mile costs and ensure faster delivery. When leveraging a well-balanced network, it also allows for redundancy in their supply […]
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