Articles
I.T. Toolkit
ProvisionAi and Riviana Foods: Get a Load of This
Walk through any grocery store, and you’ll likely come across products from Riviana Foods. It’s one of the largest processors, marketers, and distributors of branded and private-label rice products in the United States. Its brands include Minute, Success, Mahatma, Adolphus, RiceSelect, and others.
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Musco & AFS Logistics: Oiling the Wheels of Change
About five years ago, when Michael Lin joined Musco Family Olive Co. as senior director of supply chain, he “walked into a tight-running operation,” he says. At the same time, Lin sought to bring greater discipline and automation to many of the company’s logistics and supply chain processes. To work toward these goals, Lin enlisted the help of AFS Logistics, a third-party logistics provider.
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Cream of the Crops
With several hundred locations in more than 70 countries, management at Bayer Crop Science needed greater visibility and access to the information that could help it make fact-based logistics decisions, boost asset utilization, and enhance on-time delivery.
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Operating in Style
After working for several years in the field of styling and fashion, Joelle Desaulniers created the eponymous JOELLE Collection. The Quebec-based company offers unique dresses, sweaters, jumpsuits, and jewelry, among other items, through a thriving online business and a boutique in Trois-Rivieres. Another boutique in Place Ste-Foy is slated to open later in 2023.
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Design Time: Leveraging a WMS to Furnish Homes Sustainably
By offering minimalist, modern design and quality materials, home furnishing company Oliver Space has grown to more than 100 employees over the past three years, expanding from its headquarters in San Francisco to serve six cities along the West Coast and in southwestern United States. Along the way, it has helped furnish thousands of homes.
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Case Study: Maintenance Equipment Maker Paves a Road to Business Intelligence
For more than a century, E.D. Etnyre & Co. and its sister company BearCat Manufacturing have built industrial equipment that helps cities, towns, and other organizations maintain and preserve millions of miles of asphalt roads. You’ll find the companies’ beefy rigs in countries across the globe.
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Starborn Industries Fastens on Visibility and Automation Solutions
Starborn Industries—its name reflects the era of the space race—has grown to become a national distributor and one of the largest importers of drywall screws in the country since its launch in 1961. It has also created its own fastener and product lines for the deck construction market. The Customer Starborn Industries, Inc. started as […]
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TMS Keeps the Presses Running
OVOL USA is one of the world’s largest suppliers of paper, pulp, and specialty substrates. Eric Krizay, the company’s vice president of corporate logistics, had been searching for a transportation management system (TMS) that would meet the unique needs of all the company’s divisions. At the same time, he needed a solution that was straightforward to implement and use.
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ERP Makes the Grass Greener
Since its founding more than five decades ago, Lawn Equipment Parts Company (LEPCO), a family-owned wholesale distributor of outdoor power equipment, parts, and accessories, has grown to handle six brands of power equipment and aftermarket parts for more than 1,300 dealers in the northeastern United States. LEPCO is based in Marietta, Pennsylvania.
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Light Through the Cloud
Regina Andrew did more than survive the pandemic—it thrived. “If you didn’t do well in the home furnishing industry during the pandemic, then you were doing something wrong,” says Jim Bonomo, the company’s chief operating officer.
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Getting Into the Spirits
Craft distillers like Montanya Distillers—which produces rum from its base in Crested Butte, Colorado, where the high altitude and cool temperatures allow for flavorful aging—typically have been limited to distributing products within their own state, or perhaps a few surrounding ones. If they venture farther afield, they risk falling out of compliance with the myriad regulations governing liquor distribution across the United States.
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SerVaas Laboratories Cleans Up with Business Intelligence
When a company’s employee roster lists just about 100 workers, yet its products are sold in about one dozen countries, timely, accurate sales and inventory data is critical. Business intelligence (BI) solutions, however, have traditionally exceeded the budgets of small and mid-sized companies.
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Buddha Brands Embraces the Philosophy of Supply Chain Integration
Buddha Brands, a provider of plant-based food and beverage products, including Hungry Buddha keto bars and Thirsty Buddha coconut water, has seen tremendous growth during the past decade. To sustain its success, however, the company needed more robust integration between its electronic data interchange (EDI) solution and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
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Extreme Networks Rewires Its Supply Chain
Any company that has gone through a merger and acquisition knows how challenging it can be to integrate manual and disparate supply chain processes across the newly combined organization.
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There’s No Business Like Shoe Business
About 12 years ago, G. Brent Barkin, the son of Shoe Station founder Terry S. Barkin, urged his father to start a website for the family-owned business. The senior Barkin followed his son’s advice and invested some money in creating a new channel. But he had his doubts, asking, “Who’s going to buy shoes from a website?”
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From Sea to Supermarket: Tracking the Catch of the Day
In an age when consumers keep pushing companies to prove their sustainability, social responsibility, and fair trade track record, Bumble Bee Foods is counting on its blockchain project with SAP to earn high marks.
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Hidaka Forges Automated Inventory Solution
Like most manufacturers, Hidaka USA Inc., a sheet metal fabrication company, conducts regular physical inventories of its raw materials, work in process, and finished goods. It had been using a paper-based, manual system that was time-consuming and vulnerable to mistakes, making it difficult for management to be confident they had the materials and finished goods needed to meet customer orders.
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E-Commerce Fulfillment: No Pain, No Gain
Escalade Sports has been playing the supply chain game since 1927. At one point in its history, Sears, the traditional model for catalog and retail store sales, accounted for about half of the sporting goods manufacturer and distributor’s business. Today, while the company still serves specialty shops, department stores, and big-box retailers, Amazon and other e-commerce direct-to-end-user channels have changed the game.
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Kicking the Tires on an IoT Solution
Tire manufacturer Michelin is a shipper with a massive global footprint and complex demands. With headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand, France, Michelin operates 121 production facilities in 17 countries; those facilities produced approximately 190 million tires in 2017. With a presence in 170 countries, distributing products across the globe is a challenging and sophisticated operation.
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Getting Shipments on the Right Track
Radio Frequency Systems (RFS) provides wireless and broadcast infrastructure products and solutions to customers around the globe. Because many of the company’s products require installation, on-time delivery is critical. Late or damaged shipments raise costs when installation crews must wait for the equipment to arrive.
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