Category Archive

Identifying competitive manufacturing countries. I recently read about the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report on global manufacturing cost competitiveness, which identified how the list of competitive countries has changed over the past decade. This report is important because many executives still consider that China is low cost, while western Europe and other developed countries are expensive. Based on this consideration, … Read More

Where to start. Most of us inherit the supply chains we work within. Not so long ago, to review and redesign a complex supply network was considered a big task, only be considered every five years or so and be undertaken by teams from large consultancies. As business and economic cycles became less obvious, affected by M&A activity, global procurement, … Read More

Expecting Procurement to know it all. How much should a business with a brand name know about suppliers along all of its many supply chains? This is the challenge that Baptist World Aid at http://www.behindthebarcode.org.au/ has asked of 39 electronic companies. The charity found that none of the enterprises achieved its definition of supply chain knowledge and action for improvement … Read More

Marketing and Logistics are two sides of the same coin. When entering a new market, your DIFOTA (delivery in full, on time, with accuracy) objectives for the established markets may be compromised. This requires marketing and logistics to review, within the S&OP process, your supply chains to identify a better way to satisfy all customers. This challenge became real when … Read More

Near-shoring gains prominence. This month’s McKinsey Quarterly article by Katy George is titled Near-shoring: A CEO’s Guide and provides some good thinking about trends in manufacturing, many of which will have an influence on the future structure of supply chains and operations of logistics and logistics services. Near-shoring is another term for considering your business as a set of regional (rather … Read More