Here's How Developing-Country Companies Can Afford to Enter U.S., European Markets
It's time to take a look at how globalization has come full circle. A new breed of ambitious multinational is rising on the world scene, presenting both challenges and opportunities for established global players.
These new contenders hail from seemingly unlikely places, developing nations such as Brazil, China, India, Russia, and even Egypt and South Africa. They are shaking up entire industries, from farm equipment and refrigerators to aircraft and telecom services, and changing the rules of global competition.
Unlike Japanese and Korean conglomerates, which benefited from protection and big profits at home before they took on the world, these are mostly companies that have prevailed in brutally competitive domestic markets, where local companies have to duke it out with homegrown rivals and Western multinationals every day. As a result, these emerging champions must make profits at price levels unheard of in the U.S. or Europe.
Source: Business Week, http://www.businessweek.com/

Aligning IT, Business Just Seems to Be So Many Empty Words for Many Companies
The implicit value proposition around aligning business and IT is creation of business value. It says there's so much unlocked potential in technology that if you were to use it right and align it against your business strategy or your business needs effectively, you could really leverage technology as a competitive weapon.
Most CEOs or CIOs would agree, but in reality, most organizations struggle with leveraging technology well. They're fine with using it to process their day-to-day information, but they're not taking it beyond that to really think about how technology can enable new products or services, or create new markets. Most organizations would like to use technology as a competitive weapon on a consistent and sustainable basis, but they're not [doing so] because they have a performance-oriented mind-set. The key to achieving this ability is to step out of the traditional mind-set around business-IT alignment.
Source: Optimize, http://optimizemag.com/

Supply Managers Might Ask, Just What Is On Demand, and How Does It Help Them?
At the most simplistic level, on demand is the delivery of software functionality over the internet from a single application instance that is shared across all clients. On-demand solutions require only a Web browser for access, eliminating the need to install or maintain software or hardware. They also replace upfront licensing fees and lengthy implementation cycles associated with traditional installed applications with a "pay-as-you-go", subscription-based service relationship.
However, as evidenced by Salesforce.com in the CRM realm, on demand is less about technology architecture than it is about a new business philosophy that incorporates the delivery of software, content, and services as flexible Web-based services. For supply managers this means accessing application functionality (sourcing, contract management, procurement), supply intelligence (category templates, supply market data), and support services (spend data cleansing, sourcing event management) as integrated Web services.
In this sense, on demand should be viewed less as technology and more as a utility service, such as telecommunications or electricity—highly reliable and accessible whenever and wherever required.
Source: Line 56, http://www.line56.com/

To Smooth Transition to Lean, Manufacturer Sent Employees Letter Announcing 'Concept of Change'
Lauren Manufacturing Co., a rubber manufacturer that supplies standard and custom-extruded and molded sealing solutions, had a difficult choice to make in 2002. The company was facing tough competition from around the globe, and the competition was starting to catch up to Lauren Manufacturing in terms of technology."Lauren recognized the difficulty and rather than waiting to be exterminated by the competition, we decided to take a fresh look at things," says Scott Peters, vice president of sales and marketing. "We went from what was a traditional American manufacturing mentality to a lean approach."
In December 2002, the company, located 90 miles south of Cleveland in New Philadelphia, Ohio, moved away from batch-and-queue manufacturing. To aid in the lean journey and to ensure that its union employees were all on the same page, Kevin Gray, CEO of Lauren Manufacturing's parent company, Lauren International Inc., primed the pump with a letter to employees announcing the "concept of change."
In part, the letter stated that eliminating waste was the way to stay ahead of the competition. Gray also noted, "We have to break down the mental walls between divisions, departments and even individual job assignments."
The upfront communication enabled Lauren Manufacturing's management to stress to the workforce the importance of embracing lean, says Lisa Huntsman, vice president of operations.
Source: Industry Week, http://industryweek.com/

Pharmaceutical Distributor Kicks Off RFID Pilot in Supply Chain from 'End-to-End'
An important pharmaceutical trial kicked off in New Jersey at the end of June, at Cardinal Health's label-printing facility. The distribution giant, based in Dublin, Ohio, is shifting into high gear its pilot program to test radio frequency identification (RFID) technology throughout the drug supply chain.
RFID comes in the form of razor-thin tags that are applied to product and shipping containers for purposes of tracking and identification. The technology, which the Food and Drug Administration has pushed the industry to try, is seen as a means to fight counterfeiting, reduce slow-downs in the supply chain and make it harder for U.S. drugs sold at a discount to foreign distributors or pharmacies to make their way back into the country to undercut domestic pricing.
Cardinal is one of a wave of drug manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and pharmacies across the country taking part in tests to establish standards on how and what type of RFID tags should be used throughout the industry.
"Our pilot is unique from some other pilots because it is the first one to track the RFID tags in the supply chain from end to end," says Troy Kirkpatrick, spokesperson for Cardinal.
Source: CRM Buyer, http://crmbuyer.com/

AMR & NRF: Retailers Still Take Much Too Long to Respond to Changing Consumer Demands
Demand-driven retailers must use agile supply networks to sense and profitably respond to demand. Having agility throughout a network of suppliers lets retailers slash overall lead time for product and new product introductions in an effort to capitalize on demand. AMR Research and the National Retail Federation recently surveyed retailers and vertically integrated manufacturers to assess their performances, abilities, and initiatives for cycle times within their supply networks. The findings show that although much work has been done, there is still more to do. For example, while increasingly faced with the need to be more responsive to changing consumer demands, half of respondents indicated a total lead time in excess of six months. Retailers and branded suppliers must improve supply chain collaboration, visibility, and flexibility to continue to shrink lead times.
Source: AMR Research, http://amrresearch.com/

Air Cargo Carriers Vie for Your Business in 'Wild West'-Like Eastern Europe
Europeans like to refer to Eastern Europe as "our little China"—Europe's boom area for low-cost manufacturing. For many cargo operators it can also seem something like the Wild West.
Where once there was the Iron Curtain, now there is a vast new territory waiting to be explored. Forgotten places such as Bratislava (Slovakia), Timosoara (Romania) and Katowice (Poland), long on the margins of the European economic map, are suddenly the focus of major industrial investment and a welcome source of new shipping business.
The sites also are on the growing new frontier of competition for air cargo business as shippers redraw logistics routes while carriers and airports jockey for position on the changing European landscape.
Source: Air Cargo World, http://aircargoworld.com/

Integrating Trading Partners' IT Systems Isn't Impossible, But Who Really Wants to Do It?
Despite the amazing technical advances of recent years, and all the talk about agility and real-time information, the information systems that link customer to supplier remain woefully limited. A 2004 report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology estimated that each year, inadequate integration between supply-chain partners costs the automotive and electronics industries combined around $9 billion in lost income and business opportunities. What's the problem? It's partly the mind-boggling complexity of the technology. But according to M. Lynne Markus, a professor of information management at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., the real reason is as old as EDI itself: the difficulty of getting partners to adopt these systems and use them well.
Source: CIO Insight, http://www.cioinsight.com/


Click here to subscribe or renew your subscription to Global Logistics & Supply Chain Strategies magazine