This summer in the Boston area has been an interesting one. We have seen temperatures fluctuating in a bizarre pattern that I cannot ever remember, with a few days in August only reaching a high temperature of the upper sixties. So, when the leaves started changing colors in early August and dropping off the trees, I couldn’t help but wonder if the cooler temperatures this summer were bringing an extremely early fall. It turns out […]
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Omni-channel continues to be one of the hottest trends in supply chain management today, basically touching every software application you can imagine. In order to truly be omni-channel, retailers and brand manufacturers must provide a unified brand experience for their customers. This is true for all three major phases of the customer journey – before, during, and after the sale. The key is to use all available channels in a complementary way, using the specific […]
Read More →Campbell Soup’s forecast accuracy had gradually deteriorated. The company engaged in advanced benchmarking as part of a holistic strategy to improve our results by strengthening their processes, people, and tools. The result? Forecast accuracy better than the industry average.
Read More →I’ve been briefed by several providers of AI platforms. I’m left uneasy by these briefings. It is as if Artificial Intelligence is like a magic wand, wave it and your problems disappear. But Teknowlogi appears to have a practical AI Platform, the first I’ve come across.
Read More →Wednesday marked the 22nd anniversary of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia’s death. Whether you are a fan of the Grateful Dead, or any of the large number of side projects he worked on, Jerry Garcia is a cultural icon and a very talented guitarist / songwriter. I actually never saw him play, and outside of hearing Touch of Grey hit mainstream radio in the summer of 1987 while on a West Coast road trip with […]
Read More →The hyper-competitive world of eCommerce has come down to this: it’s my supply chain against your supply chain. If I can ship better, cheaper, and faster than you, I win. For that to happen, I need to provide my customers with more choices and better visibility when they need it. And, of course, easy and free returns. In the meantime, Amazon continues to raise the bar. For eCommerce businesses (who isn’t one these days?) to […]
Read More →US GDP grew at about a 2 percent annual growth rate in the first half of the year. The logistics and warehousing industry grew at a tepid rate in the first quarter. But this is positive when compared with the Q1 performance of recent years when the industry actually contracted, likely due to atypical seasonality. According to US Census data, US exports in the first half of 2017 totaled $763.6 billion, representing a 7.3 percent increase over the total for the first half of 2016. According to US Census data, US exports in the first half of 2017 totaled $763.6 billion, representing a 7.3 percent increase over the total for the first half of 2016.
Read More →Today’s massively increasing collections of data improve the potential value of data analytics applications like machine learning. How can you extract useful answers and conclusions from the data you have? In industry, the “data warehouse” concept has been used to merge operational data with business data. The basic idea is to collect and organize the data before it is stored, with business intelligence-related uses in mind. If, for example, the plant manager wants to see […]
Read More →Companies with B2B order flows have been slower to understand the important role a distributed order management system can play in increasing customer satisfaction, sales, and helping to insure orders flow to customers in the most profitable way possible.
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Supply Chain Brief
Utilizing Big Data to Improve Supply Chain Performance
Measuring on-time performance was once the most common key performance indicator (KPI) for transportation departments when visibility solutions first became available. Each quarter, a carrier score card was reviewed. Ocean and air carriers were measured by on-time performance. Rail carriers reported and measured theirs as scheduled departures. And motor carriers were measured by their service types. Very rarely were companies looking at the performance of multi-mode or multi-leg shipments. Even more uncommon were the best […]
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