New approach to financing trade

from nationmultimedia.com

Banks can play a crucial role in supply-chain management, freeing up companies to concentrate on looking after business

While a business may identify itself in many ways, one of the most common is by its position in a supply chain. This is a network of business partners that produces raw materials, semi-finished goods and finished products and then distributes them to the end customers. A single business entity may find itself playing different roles to different counterparts; it may find itself both upstream and downstream, depending on which trading partner it is dealing with.

SAP Helps Companies Meet The Challenges And Reduce The Costs Of Global Trade

from supplychainmarket.com

SAP Delivers New Transportation Management Functionality to World-Class Supply Chain Management Solution, Allowing Companies to Better Plan, Maintain and Execute Shipments Globally

Delivering on its commitment to help companies adapt processes and optimize revenue across the most cost-intensive global trade operations, SAP AG (NYSE:SAP) announced the immediate availability of new transportation management functionality for mySAP(TM) Supply Chain Management (mySAP SCM). Building on SAP’s existing transportation management software, used today by more than 2,200 companies worldwide, the new functionality delivers enhancements in the areas of ocean shipping management and transportation planning. These enhancements will help companies increase visibility and control of shipments globally while reducing the costs associated with transportation management by making the process more flexible and dynamic.

DHL Sets New Benchmark In Supply Chain Security And Quality

from bernama.com.my

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 28 (Bernama) — DHL, the world’s leading express and logistics company, has set a new industry benchmark in its continuous drive to provide customers with superior security and service levels in end-to-end supply chain solutions.

The company now has over 100 facilities which are certified with Technology Asset Protection Association (TAPA) in Asia Pacific, it said in a statement, here Thursday.

TAPA is a highly sought-after industry security accreditation conducted by independent TAPA-trained and accredited auditors, which are awarded to facilities that meet the highest security standards for handling high-value technology goods in supply chains.

Online Marketplace Evolution

from industryweek.com

In their infancy, many online marketplaces kept their focus too narrow. Those that saw the big picture survived.
By Traci Purdum

Imagine that your job as a procurement manager involved sourcing your company’s needed resources from 500 different marketplaces. If you needed steel, you would go to a steel marketplace. If you needed gypsum, you would go to the gypsum marketplace, and so on.

Seems absurd, but that’s what some early settlers in the online marketplace frontier once offered — a niche so narrow that it drove them out of business. After all, normal people don’t go to an egg store for eggs, a flour store for flour and a cheese store for cheese. They go to a supermarket that offers myriad choices and even has the added convenience of banking, dry cleaning, florist and photo services.

Touched by tech: Supplies needed … stat

from post-gazette.com

Hospitals are notoriously bad spenders.

Purchasing must-have medical supplies is often an ordeal for employees, a process commonly riddled with red tape and no guarantee that the needle, scalpel or even gauze will be in hand when needed.

That was a common scenario at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which until this year, was stuck in a time warp — using old-fashioned carbon-copy order forms to purchase ultramodern tools used to conduct state-of-the-art medical research.

Spansion Taps PLM to Streamline Supply Chain Collaboration across Enterprise

from sdcexec.com

Largest pure-play provider of flash memory solutions to deploy Agile product lifecycle management solution globally

By Editorial Staff
San Jose, CA — December 20, 2006 — Flash memory company Spansion is set to deploy a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution from Agile Software across its entire enterprise to improve security and beef up visibility, management and collaboration of new and changing product record information across the extended supply chain.

Acquisition Reformer: Bringing Stability, Integrity and Realistic Costing to Procurement

from military-information-technology.com

Interview with Sue C. Payton, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition

s the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, Sue C. Payton is the Air Force’s service acquisition executive, responsible for all Air Force research, development and non-space acquisition activities. She provides direction, guidance and supervision of all matters pertaining to the formulation, review, approval and execution of acquisition plans, policies and programs.

Free ERP

from line56.com

A list of free enterprise resource planning (ERP) products that could be of big interest to small companies
by Demir Barlas and Tamina Vahidy, Line5

Sourceforge.net is a repository of free open source software, and a lot of it applies to e-business. We’ve compiled this list of free enterprise resource planning (ERP) products. One of them might be appropriate for your small business. Click on the product name to get more information and download links straight from Sourceforge.

7 Supply Chains to Look Out For in 2007

from logisticstoday.com

Nashville-based Lifeway Christian Resources is the largest Christian publisher and retailer in the world. But as Mike Harry, the company’s chief supply chain officer, claims, “Our competition is really less about other Christian players than ‘How do we get people engaged in the Word?’ instead of going to Las Vegas. The competition is all the other ways people entertain themselves. We’re trying to offer something with a bit more internal value.”

Lifeway has a broad customer base includes Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club. Its books are sold by Barnes & Nobel, Borders, Waldenbooks and other book retailers. “Our customers range from an individual to a church to a trade book store,” says Harry.

People: Supply Chain’s Secret Weapon

from sdcexec.com

By Anne M. Kohler

Gone are the days when it was enough to deliver incremental savings by forcing suppliers to shave a couple of percentage points off their prices. Now CEOs are demanding that their supply chain/strategic sourcing organizations become competitive competencies for their companies. Creating complex global supply chains to take advantage of constantly moving cost arbitrage opportunities and managing the inherent risk involved; constantly increasing the value from supplier relationships by relying on them for things like joint product innovation; and having supply chain strategies drive business strategies — these are examples of the new realities facing our profession. In fact, in certain industries the supply market is so constrained that the sourcing professional’s challenge is to create competitive advantage for the company by securing capacity at favorable terms over the competition.