Disruptions to the supply chain

If any event reveals the need for resilient supply chains, it’s COVID-19. The disruptions shook every industry, including automobile. Early 2020 forecasts projected a significant drop in new vehicle sales, but ultimately turned out much better with only a 15% reduction from the total 2019 sales.

It’s no surprise the pandemic has prompted several automotive companies to embrace new supply chain strategies that allowed them to recover quickly while also setting them up for future growth. Many automotive companies stood up crisis teams and control towers to improve visibility and maintain profitability, which in turn developed into an advanced strategy around predictive risk management and multi tier supplier collaboration.

Even with the automotive industry embracing new supply chain practices, another disruption has risen in the semiconductor chip shortage. With modern vehicles often containing thousands of semiconductors, this crisis underscores another dimension of supply chain risk exposure and highlights the critical need to collaborate with multi tier partners for globally limited supplies.

To keep up with lofty yet mandatory customer expectations, your supply chain can’t afford to stop investing in technology that improves processes, connects business partners and IoT data, and uses machine learning algorithms to improve business outcomes. If the people tasked with running your supply chain are relying on poorly built or outdated systems filled with data quality issues, then they need new technology solutions and strategies to overcome these shortcomings to create true value.

As you strive to balance cost while simultaneously improve your customer service, you are no doubt confronting issues that require better collaboration amongst your group as well as the numerous companies you interact with daily. The days of each department or company working on an island while hoping groups further downstream can correct any mistakes are long gone.

Nowadays, those of us in the supply chain space realize the need for ongoing collaboration with everyone who touches our supply chain. This can take the form of sharing data around forecasts, inventory positions, capacity plans, order status (both at rest and in-transit), as well as visibility into shipments.

Employees at hotel and other hospitality locations are the heart of their organisations, representing company values and mission to deliver the best possible guest experience consistently. But hospitality industry trends coming out of a very disruptive period show a worrying shortage of labour, with workers having time and financial support during lockdown to consider other options when it comes to their careers and their futures.

Making sure that hospitality work is rewarding, and that environments are supportive is more important than ever before to the future of the industry. How does advanced hotel technology help to address this vital concern? How must systems and processes in hotels and resorts best support hospitality workers day to day, help to identify how to reward their hard work, and retain their talent? Here are some examples to consider.

If you follow industry news, attend prospect events, or read our partner Infor's website, you know that vertical industry expertise is a favorite topic for Infor executives, leaders, and strategists. Industry-specific functionality is part of our critical foundation and a strong differentiating feature for our software solutions, we say frequently. But, have you thought about why? Do you know where our industry expertise comes from and how we leverage it into valuable selling points? Let’s look closer at what “industry expertise” means, why we are highly focused on it as a strategy, and how it will propel Infor forward.

The backstory

To understand where we are going, it helps to know how we got here. History provides context. In the evolution of ERP solutions, there’s a long and winding road that providers and users travelled before today’s Software as a Service (SAAS) model became the accepted best practice. In early days of ERP solutions, massive monolithic solutions with complex architecture and rigid code structure were the norm. Large enterprises invested heavily and hired consultants to customize the operational features. The heavily modified systems were costly to update.

Then came cloud computing. But, for companies to take advantage of the benefits of multi-tenant cloud deployment, they needed to have their industry-specific functionality already built into the solution—so modifications wouldn’t be needed. Modifications slow down deployment and can get in the way of upgrades.

Infor had been heavily investing into industry-specific features of the core ERP solutions. The solutions contain the functionality needed for industry specific applications—making it easier to migrate to the cloud.

Chances are your brand already relies on an ERP solution to house foundational functions and master data. But can it withstand the rapid developmental, transactional, and digitized industry of the future? To meet the rigorous demands of supply, demand, financials, inventory management, and the needs of a collaborative network, the ERP solution employed by your company needs to have the flexibility to meet changing business models, encapsulate industry best practice processes, and integrate in real time with other key applications. Just as your people need to be connected in a collaborative network, so do your technology solutions.

The fashion business has unique demands, and one of the most critical is the need for a collaborative design and development process. This process must be able to function in an environment of complex global sourcing, whether a company is in high fashion, luxury goods, apparel, footwear, home textiles, accessories, or any other style-based products. What makes this unique—and quite complicated—for fashion companies, is the sheer number of varieties that typically exist within product lines, such as styles, colors, and sizes. This complexity compounds further when additional lines and collections enter the mix.

In this  blog post, we’ll explore the first step in reinforcing a collaborative network which is to establish a strong product lifecycle management process that helps manage collections, sustainable fabric compositions, and design specifications. 

As the remote work revolution sweeps the globe, contrarians are quick to point out that certain industries and positions may not be realistic candidates for working from home. Jobs in hospitality are frequently pointed to as examples of roles that require a physical presence – after all, that bed will not make itself. But forward-thinking organizations are using this crisis as the impetus to think creatively about what is and is not needed on-site.

Who is best suited to be in a remote work setting?
The grand remote work experiment we have all participated in over the last few months has resulted in a renewed interest in the concept becoming a regular component of the corporate landscape. And while enthusiasm for the approach has grown considerably, abandoning the physical office may not be attractive to everyone. In fact, some people have been quite vocal in their call for a return to the workplace, as they complain about their increased workload, lack of social interaction, constant parade of exhausting Zoom calls and inability to quickly (and clearly) communicate with colleagues. So how can we tell the difference between an admirer and an adversary of this new model of work?

Competitive supply chains must enable a new level of coordinated performance that creates a high-fidelity picture of in-process flows across your extended network. Building the continuous supply chain supports contextual deviations, conveys alerts and drives continuous planning via sense & respond capabilities.

Optimizing multi-party business processes

Supply chains are complex networks where over 80% of the data and processes sits within partner systems. To see and act on the latest picture of your supply chain, your company needs that data from each of your partners, but the problem is most companies rely solely on an enterprise-centric approach to solve a multi-enterprise problem.

The only way to overcome those limitations is to adopt a "network approach." Connecting all partners to shared processes, data and metrics managed within a single platform creates a single version of truth for all parties. This allows supply chains to eliminate the data silos and inherent latency in order to reduce the root causes of friction, variability and costs in today’s supply chains, both internally and externally.

When every transaction counts more so than ever before in restaurants and food services, forward-thinking strategies around restaurant menu management have become more important than ever before. Central to that is how much leading organizations have risen to the occasion to streamline the way they manage they their offering and push the newest versions of menus to the point of sale, unified across locations and concepts.

Restaurants and managed food services rely on current data and the technology needed to find useful narratives about how to enhance performance and maximize returns, specifically at the menu item level. How does that work? What role does restaurant POS play in that process? Let’s take a look.