According to a new survey from Deloitte, organizations with superior supply chain capabilities achieve significantly higher levels of performance on both revenue growth and EBIT measures when compared to the industry average.

The survey reveals that 79 percent of organizations with superior supply chain capabilities ("supply chain leaders") report revenue growth that is considerably above the industry average. Conversely, only eight percent of the organizations with lower supply chain performance report significantly above-average revenue growth. Furthermore, 69 percent of supply chain leaders have an EBIT margin that is well above the industry average compared to only nine percent of supply chain followers.

There is growing recognition that outsourcing can deliver much more than just a lower-cost model, and it can create opportunities to harness added value through redefining the procurement approach.

In particular, there is an evident shift towards developing effective partnerships and transparency during the procurement process to achieve better outcomes for all.

In an effort to stave off any work stoppage as shipments arrive to West Coast ports for the crucial holiday selling period, the National Retail Federation urged Tuesday that maritime management and the union representing dockworkers should expedite pending contract negotiations before current contracts expire this summer.

 

"We urge you to begin contract negotiations now and to attempt to reach agreement on a new contract before the June 30 expiration," NRF President/CEO Matthew Shay wrote in a letter to all parties. "These negotiations are important to all of the import and export and related industries who rely on these ports to move the nation’s commerce."

Clouds change shape all the time, both those in the sky and the kind that contain software to run warehouses. The cloud-based software model is making logistics execution systems more affordable for smaller and mid-size companies that made-do with home-made warehouse management remedies.

The WMS challenges they feared—licensing fees and customization-cost-creep—are gradually being addressed as service providers enter the market with new offerings. 

Our conversation with Rob Howard, CEO of Grand Junction, started with a discussion about eBay’s same day delivery service, eBay Now. But we quickly switched gears to how quickly the sands are shifting when it comes to online order fulfillment and what the future is likely to look like. A hint: it’s not about the distribution center. Instead, it could center on how well brick-and-mortar retail executes on in-store fulfillment and local delivery - services that pure e-commerce retailers will find difficult to match.  Here’s Howard’s take.

30,000 new Supply Chain Technician jobs are being added annually in the United States.

There are currently 200,000 Supply Chain Technicians working in the United States and this number is increasing 15% annually.

Though the demand for these skilled professionals is growing, there is a shortage of them in the industry. With average salaries in the mid-$30,000s, these are high-quality jobs that are flying under the radar, but are very important across all industries.

U.S. wholesale inventories rose at a slower pace in February, strengthening views that restocking will weigh on economic growth in the first quarter.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday wholesale inventories increased 0.5 percent after advancing 0.8 percent in January. The increase in wholesale stocks in February was in line with economists' expectations.

Companies have historically reviewed their distribution networks every five or six years. These reviews were easy to delay, given their complexity and the likelihood that a consultant would be required to facilitate the process.  Once the distribution network was set, costs were then justified to fit into that network, which had a multi-year life cycle.

 

But today’s rapidly shifting customer bases and business models no longer mesh with a more "fixed" distribution network strategy. "In the current environment, consumers want their orders right away and the service expectations are rapidly rising," said Greg Braun, senior vice president sales and marketing for C3 Solutions a provider of dock scheduling and yard management solutions. "Any bottlenecks in the supply chain must be removed."

Large UK manufacturers lost £58m in 2013 due to issues around disruption to their supply chains, according to a new report. The study, released by supply chain management firm Achilles, shows the average loss to each manufacturer amounted to £105,000 last year, despite many of the issues being preventable, according to Achilles chief executive Adrian Chamberlain. 

A primary reason for the losses was the failure to deliver products of required quality, believed to cost the industry £20.4m. 

Apple did it. So did Motorola, Ford, Intel, General Electric, and other electronics and automotive firms. In fact, it was a trend in many industries, as organizations such as Master Lock, Sleek Audio, and AirGuide Manufacturing joined the stampede. All in all, around 500 companies are known to have moved either all or part of their manufacturing operations back to the United States from foreign countries.

Though a host of factors have coalesced to reverse the trend that so recently eliminated 6 million American manufacturing jobs, few speak as loudly as rising costs in China. In a much-publicized Boston Consulting Group survey, many companies cited the soaring cost of labor in China as the primary reason for moving their operations.

Import volume at the nation's major retail container ports is expected to increase 6.1 percent in April, according to the monthly Global Port Tracker report released by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates.

"With winter over, retailers are stocking up in anticipation of a busy spring and summer," NRF vice president for supply chain and customs policy Jonathan Gold said. "Consumers can expect plentiful supplies of merchandise."

In 2013, 80% of supply chain leaders had a material supply chain disruption. It was not just one. The average company had  three. Yet, in a study that we just completed, when asked about business pain, supply chain risk rates low. How come?

 

It is new.  It lacks a consistent definition and set of practices. Companies reward the urgent. Risk management requires a focus on the important. It requires leadership and orchestration. Teams don’t know what to do. The companies that are the most mature learned the hard way. They had a disruption.

Any attempt to apply ‘lean’ thinking to a manufacturer or retailer’s supply chain must have merchandise life cycle plans in alignment with supply chain strategy to succeed, according to the Vice President of Strategic Services at software company JDA.

 

Steve Davis of the American software and consulting company JDA, which specializes in supply chain management, likes to make sure that companies he deals with apply the lean process to the merchandising planning process, all the way from the very beginning. 

Investment in automation is yielding greater efficiencies throughout the supply chain, and that will likely continue as more manufacturers—even mid-market organizations—upgrade antiquated systems, several Motorola Solutions representatives and channel partners said during a recent media briefing.

"It’s amazing how many (manufacturers) are still manual in their warehouse and supply chain—paper based," said Tim Wills, vice president of marketing and support with Peak-Ryzex, which is a Motorola Solutions channel partner. "These are market leaders, names we would all know, and they’re really trying to take their business to the next level of productivity by putting that capital investment in their infrastructure.

If you own a business, then you might be aware of the bullwhip effect, which is an important supply chain phenomenon first noted by MIT systems scientist Jay Forrester. Even if you have never heard of this effect, perhaps you are familiar with the beer distribution game, which is an experiment designed to show the dynamics of managing a supply chain.

As you probably know, supply-chain management is a crucial aspect of running a product-oriented business, but projections can be difficult at best. And thus at some level dealing with supply chains can become an art form as much as a science.

Young people joining the workforce today grew up with vastly different technological toys than the baby boomers whose shoes they're stepping into. Consequently, they have different preferences about how they receive information.

This difference is crucial to manufacturing executives, because manufacturing operations amass huge amounts of information that have to be passed down the generational line. And with workforce demographics changing as baby-boom retirements ramp up, this knowledge transfer process has to happen faster than it used to.