A water purification company in Brazil can have the demand for their water treatment and sewage services increase as much as four times on a sunny day on a weekend. To more accurately forecast demand, they count the number of vehicles driving into the community. Demand analysis also relies on a forecast of weather conditions and historical tourism data. They are also prototyping IoT, Big Data, machine learning, and predictive analytics for process optimization.
When I speak with new customers, many of them tell me how in the past they viewed supply chain design as an optimization project that was completed every three to five years, often by third-party firms. Now these large, multi-national businesses are bringing supply chain design in-house and adopting it as a core business process. […]
When companies decide that their present warehousing operations are not what they should be, and that they need to either implement a warehouse management system (WMS) or outsource their warehousing operations to a 3PL, they need to work toward putting together a request for proposal (RFP). If that pre-work for putting together a RFP includes […]
Running Professional Services at Descartes for the last nine years, I’ve seen this old adage come up time and time again. It hasn’t mattered if the customer was implementing a TMS, Visibility, Route Planning or Mobile solution – I’ve seen “grand” projects crash or get endlessly mired and not produce the anticipated business results. The […]
An increasing number of companies that outsource production in Asia are not certain about key manufacturing links in the supply chain. This is especially true for the apparel industry. This is largely due to an unregulated subcontracting process where work is given to subcontractors without the permission of the brand owner. Typically, this occurs because […]
Infosys, the global IT services company with an offshore model, held its annual Infosys Connect conference last month. Two directors from a very large consumer packaged goods (CPG) client spoke during a track session for analysts. Like many Western multinational firms, this company’s growth will largely come from developing countries, where the company has a […]
SAP briefed ARC a while ago on its benchmarking services, the company’s version of the benchmarking metrics offered by the Supply Chain Council (SCC) and the Warehouse Education Resource Council. In fact, SAP tells us that it is “compliant” with the SCC’s Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model. This basically means that many, but not […]