Articles
Lean Supply Chain
19 Steps to Creating a Lean and Green Supply Chain
Nurturing a green, sustainable supply chain benefits the environment and your bottom line. Here are some tactics—from analyzing your transportation network and warehouse design to looking for recycling opportunities—to help you go green and get lean.
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What’s Your Sourcing Strategy?
Having a current, flexible sourcing strategy can not only reduce costs and increase efficiency, but also serve as a competitive advantage to help organizations increase the top line. Supply chain costs, primarily procurement and transportation, can range from 50 to 70 percent of sales, depending on industry. So it is critical to spend considerable time […]
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Predictive Analytics Takes Forecasting to a New Level
Technology users in 2012 generated 2.5 exabytes of data per day, three-quarters of which is text, audio, or video messages. That’s a lot of data for companies to review and potentially leverage, and is one reason for the increasing use of predictive analytics, a cost-effective way to filter through and utilize large amounts of data. […]
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Caldwell Hospital Gets a Lean Bill of Health
A North Carolina hospital improves patient care by prescribing a lean and healthy supply chain.
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3PL Partnerships: You’re In Good Company
As product demand continues to rise, companies of all industries are partnering with third-party logistics providers and sealing the deal with on-time and cost-effective delivery to customers.
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Using Network Optimization Technology To Enable Your Lean Supply Chain
From a lean and agile supply chain perspective, an optimally designed supply chain can significantly improve margins, support expansion into new markets, enhance the customer experience, and reduce operating costs. Optimizing your supply chain network helps achieve more value and less waste through keeping lower inventories, maintaining the right stock levels, and choosing the right […]
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Winning, With Integrity
MORE TO THE STORY: Empowering Women Through Engagement And Inspiration While building a career at 3M and its technology spinoff, Imation, Kirsten Hall never considered joining her family’s business, Logistics Planning Services (LPS) in Woodbury, Minn. "But I realized in 2010, when Mom and Dad were getting ready to step back, that I had been […]
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How to Optimize Demand Chain Management
In a perfect world, distribution centers (DCs) would disappear. Retailers and manufacturers would match incoming orders to customer demand so precisely that all products would stay in motion all the time. At most, an importer would operate a crossdock to process incoming goods for the outbound trip. This super-lean scenario poses major opportunities to reduce […]
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How Supply Chain Strategies Impact
E-commerce Success
E-commerce has emerged as part of a company’s omni-channel marketing program. Achieving success requires not only an agile, lean supply chain, but also a strategy to get there. Many e-commerce companies sell a variety of products, and each type of product establishes different strategic needs. For example, functional products require lean and flexible network strategies, […]
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Lean: It’s Not About Pens and Pencils Anymore
Traditionally, Lean has been considered a "pen and pencil" technique. But today it is a key enabler of an efficient supply chain that links lean thinking with available and affordable systems and technologies to get the most out of improved processes. This "traditional" view is understandable. In the past, Lean was more often than not […]
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