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Benefits and Trade-Offs of Cloud-Based Procurement
Cloud adoption is growing across industries. Organizations that leverage cloud-based tools for procurement have found that the cloud allows for more flexible access and collaboration while helping to decrease costs and make solutions more easily scalable. Drivers and Benefits of Cloud-Based…
Focusing on Efficiency in Logistics is No Longer Enough: Flexibility is Key
In today’s high-risk and uncertain supply chain environment, organizations must plan for disruptions and minimize their impact by balancing tradeoffs between efficiency and flexibility in logistics. While the focus on logistics efficiency alone has been a norm, recent years have underscored…
Tips to Drive Supply Chain Success Amid Uncertainty
This is an important time for the supply chain profession. Supply chains are in the news, on governments’ agendas, and in the spotlight. Supply chain professionals are facing disruptions on multiple fronts, including rising geopolitical tensions among countries and regions, shifting maritime trade…
Develop Contingency Plans for Supply Chain Disruptions
While organizations cannot avoid the unexpected, supply chain professionals can develop a “just in case” playbook with contingency plans to activate when alternatives are needed.A contingency plan spells out the actions to take, such as reallocating money, people, equipment, and other resources,…
Top 5 Procurement Strategic Objectives
APQC research shows that procurement is changing for the better with its strategic objectives. While in the past the focus was on cost savings, now there’s also an emphasis on avoiding supply disruption. Reflecting other changes in business environments, additional notable objectives include…
Measuring Supply Chain Change Management
In the post-pandemic world, one constant in supply chain has become change. As a result, organizations are investing more time and resources to undertake change management projects within and across supply chain functions.With so many rapid, moving parts, how do organizations decide if a change has…
2024 Predictions for Supply Chain
In recent years, supply chain management (SCM) has come face to face with many challenges—global pandemic shutting down factories, post-pandemic labor shortages and port congestion, intensification of climate change, growing inflation, and geopolitical tensions. These challenges forced…
Last Mile Deliveries are Critical for 2024
Evolving customer behaviors and expectations mean that organizations are facing increasing pressure to change. In our customer service research, APQC found that the COVID-19 pandemic and other disruptions are leading many business-to-business (B2B) customers to develop the same expectations as…
Advanced Supply Chain Analytics Investment Is Worthwhile
In late 2022, APQC carried out a quick poll of 278 manufacturing organizations about the use ofadvanced analytics in supply chain. ‘Advanced analytics’ refers to technology-enabled, complex processes of examining large and varied data sets to uncover key trends, unknown correlations, customer…
Why Procure-to-Pay Governance is a Struggle
In response to increasing global interest in end-to-end processes, APQC has gathered insight into how organizations are governing and managing their procure-to-pay (P2P) processes. This end-to-end process begins with ordering goods and services, then receiving those goods and services, and finally…