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Logistics and Supply Chain news, articles, tips and insights
HR Management Strategy and Logistics Workforce Performance
A high-performance supply chain is essential for any company to stay in front of the competition, and contrary to what many IT aficionados would have you believe, people are still the critical ingredient in supply chain performance. At a time when many...
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The Supply Chain and the Value Chain: The Same but Different?
You may have heard the term "value chain" being used among supply chain professionals and wondered if it's just a trendy alternative label, or if there is some difference between value chain and supply chain. Are they one and the same? Are they different? The answer...
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Why Supply Chain Inventory Should Matter to the Finance Pros
Here at Supply Chain Secrets, we like to talk about some of the issues in supply chain that matter to professionals in other parts of an organisation, like finance and IT for example. In this post, we cover some of the reasons why inventory should be a...
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Offshore Manufacturing: 3 Tips for Working With Chinese Sourcing Agents
When it comes to outsourcing your product manufacturing to China, I strongly recommend that you do your own legwork with regard to manufacturer selection. Once you have a manufacturer shortlist however, it will make sense to engage a Chinese sourcing agent to...
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Is Your Supply Chain Network an Inventory Farm?
You might have noticed that "optimisation" is becoming quite the supply chain buzzword of late, especially amid any discussions about supply chain network design. In case you're thinking it's just another nice conceptual idea though, and that supply chain...
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Should Your Company Outsource Logistics? Ask These 4 Questions first
Over the last decade, outsourcing logistics has become a strong and continuing trend among manufacturers and sales organisations. In following that trend, some companies have had considerable success, while others have entered an expensive cycle of transition...
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Learn About Supply Chain by Networking With the Experts
If you're a professional within a manufacturing or sales company, you'll probably know something about supply chain. However, you might not have thought about the need to know about the inner workings of the logistics, procurement, and other functions which...
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Warehouse Excellence: The Seat of Customer Loyalty?
The warehouse, sometimes lying far from the customers it serves, may sound like an unlikely driver of customer loyalty, but in fact it has a huge impact on the customer experience. Companies that achieve warehouse excellence have a greater likelihood of securing...
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How to Provide High-quality Data for the Supply Chain Team
If you're in the IT game, and responsible for data in a manufacturing, sales, or logistics organisation, you're likely at some point to provide the supply chain team with data for network optimisation, supply chain modeling, or some similar project requiring...
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Supply Chain Spend Analysis: A Win-win For Procurement and Logistics?
When procurement and other supply chain-related business functions work closely together, your company's financial performance can only see improvement. More and more organizations are gaining awareness of this and are focused on closing the divide between procurement...
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An Introduction to Supply Chain Collaboration
If you're new to the supply chain arena, there will inevitably be terms and concepts with which you are not familiar. Some of them can be a little confusing too, until you put in some research effort to better understand them, since their names alone may not reveal...
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The Advantage of Warehouse Automation in the Sustainable Supply Chain
As a supply chain professional, it's likely that you think of warehouse automation in terms of reduced operating costs, quality and productivity improvements, waste elimination and manpower cuts. However, for the sustainable supply chain, automation can...
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Manufacturing in China: Still Viable in 2016?
Despite reports of a slowdown in the number of companies outsourcing manufacturing to Chinese factories, and the country's economic downturn, China remains a popular location for contract manufacturing. This is evidenced by the decision of at least two Western...
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Should the HR Team Care About MHE Selection in Supply Chain?
Whether you work for a manufacturer or brand owner with its own logistics operation or you are a manager for a 3PL provider, mechanical handling equipment is probably a critical element in your storage and transportation activities. When buying new...
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3 Sales and Operations Planning Traps to Avoid
Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is a simple enough process, yet it's one which many organisations struggle to implement and maintain successfully. To some extent this is perfectly understandable, since a successful S&OP process requires unfettered...
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