No vertical market appears to be immune to the hardships and challenges resulting from the unprecedented uncertainty and volatility of today’s geopolitical strife, climate disasters, and global pandemics. Which makes it even that much more challenging for organizations to try to meet consumer preferences and requirements that are always changing.

All of this uncertainty underscores the importance for organizations to focus on optimizing all facets of their supply chain costs—including cost-to-source, cost-to-procure, cost-to-manufacture, logistics, and handing. Supply chain optimization must also factor in the direct labor that drives supply chain activities in manufacturing, distribution, and retail. Total cost has never been more critical to understand and control—regardless of an organization’s industry or sector.

An established digital ecosystem lets brands reduce design-plan-manufacture cycles, improve supply chain planning accuracy, enable end-to-end inventory visibility, and help manage financial orchestration and liquidity. This helps ensure that the right products get to the right place, at the right time—on budget, and aligned with sustainability efforts that appeal to customers socially and environmentally. Additionally, a connected supply chain can improve visibility of key production metrics such as water usage and chemical content, all of which can be shared with consumers.

Collaborative networks connect complex systems of enterprises, applications, service providers, data sources, and devices involved in a fashion brand’s value chain and host them on a cloud-based platform for optimal performance and accessibility. Cloud-based systems facilitate the communication, performance, scale, security, and computing power needed to leverage technology solutions across the entire design to the manufacturing cycle.

In part one of this post we discussed the smartest ways to gain global visibility and respond to volatility in a food and beverage supply chain. And here in part two we will cover how to embrace the best technology. Addressing these key challenges can have a profound and positive impact on your entire supply chain—from procurement to manufacturing to delivery.

When you're looking at building a better foundation to address the challenges you may be facing within your overall organization, there's a number of solutions to consider. These aren't necessarily always the options that fall into what you’d expect to be a supply chain solution, but they all overlap within your overall supply chain and will help drive effectiveness and efficiency.

The first example is formula management. Many companies want to ascertain that it’s creating the right products for the right country as there may be limitations from a global perspective of where you can sell a product. Trying to manage this manually is challenging. Being able to respond to inquiries from customers and prospects around the globe requires quite a robust formula management solution.

The process of managing a product’s lifecycle has come a long way since the days of Excel spreadsheets. Or has it? In this episode of Supply Chain Radio, Stan Pryzbylinski, vice president of research at CIMdata joins Matt Gunn and Jenny Reese to discuss how PLM software has evolved in the world of manufacturing.

Over the past decade, businesses have increasingly relied on contract manufacturing and outsourced supply chain services to make and move the goods they sell. Today, $751 billion in goods are produced and imported from offshore trading partners into the US. Meanwhile, US logistics costs amount to nearly $1.15 billion—or 7.7% of the US GDP. Many manufacturers and retailers rely on a vast network of both production and logistics partners to keep the supply chain moving.

With so many dollars at stake, inefficiencies anywhere in the supply chain can have an impact on a company’s bottom line. Extra overhead at the top of the supply chain can easily cascade, affecting costs all the way down the supply chain. Which is why successful manufacturers and retailers are evolving the way they do business, rather than allowing problems to shift elsewhere in their supply chain network. Read on to learn what manufacturers and retailers can do today to help keep their entire end-to-end supply chain operating at peak efficiency

Is your omni-channel strategy killing employee morale?

After a year that saw unexpected innovations, disruptions, and new policies and tariffs, can we truly predict what’s ahead for the global supply chain in 2019? We’ll certainly try. In the final episode of 2018, Matt Gunn and Guy Courtin gaze into the crystal ball to gauge what the near future will bring to the world of supply chain, and whether businesses are better prepared to sense and respond to the many unexpected changes that happen each day.

Digital technology is changing the world, one industry at a time. With these changes comes a reimagining of the supply chain, from the systems businesses use to communicate and interact, to the strategies they deploy to move goods around the world.

Digitalization gives rise to new business models, in which real-time connectivity, greater visibility, reactivity, and anticipation become the underlying characteristics of our supply chains. But this kind of change isn’t easy, and transformation doesn’t happen overnight.

By taking a staged approach to digital transformation, and building greater connectivity across the supply chain, businesses can pave the way toward a fully connected future, while still being able to tackle the biggest challenges they face right now.

This time last year, we looked at the Fashion Revolution movement and its clarion call for transparency across fashion supply chains. Since then, the movement has gained even more momentum; 2017 numbers reflect greater participation on social media with more consumers asking #whomademyclothes, and more workers posting photos of themselves replying, #imadeyourclothes. 

Crucially, more brands are responding to the demand for transparency. 2017’s Fashion Revolution Week had over 1,000 mainstream clothing brands respond to #whomademyclothes, up from around 400 the previous year. It’s a safe bet that this form of engagement will keep growing in the coming years. So the real question becomes, what’s next?

By Greg Kefer, VP marketing, Infor

OK, I realize the headline is a bit loaded, but I got inspired after coming across a market study by Geodis that found only 6% of companies claim to have “full visibility” across their supply chains. This mirrors other studies that point to a consensus that while visibility is universally desired, few companies have it completely figured out.

Part of the challenge is defining what supply chain visibility actually is. According to Gartner, it has more than 100 software vendors on its radar that claim to have some kind of supply chain visibility offering, which means visibility into a distribution center, or plan, or plant, or region, or transport mode, or some performance KPIs would count.

Some companies have figured out visibility, and are driving tens of millions of dollars in value. But a lot of companies are on a long journey to achieve a vision. The complexities of any global supply chain are daunting, but the cost of doing nothing is too great to ignore. You cannot compete if you operate in the dark.