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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…
ESG Changing Supply Chain Decision-Making
In the current market, the increasing importance of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) is primarily influenced by new regulations and customers' ever evolving expectations. Business customers and consumers are increasingly aware of their purchases' social and environmental impacts,…
How Do You Implement A Supply Chain Control Tower?
As part of APQC’s annual research into priorities and challenges for the upcoming year, Marisa Brown conducts a global survey and interviews supply chain stakeholders from various industries and organizations. One of the people she spoke with this year, Stew Stremel, told her about an organization…
Why is Supply Chain Benchmarking Important?
Supply chain benchmarking is important because managers need to: understand how their supply chains compare to competitors’, evaluate “as is” conditions before they can determine what to fix, encourage innovation, compare performance across business units, and leverage data for…
How Do You Manage Supplier Risk? Via Business Continuity Planning
The best time to build a business continuity plan was before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the second-best time is now. Your organization—and especially your procurement team—should be armed with a robust, actionable business continuity plan that they’re continually refining and improving to prepare…
Supply Chain 2022: Focus on the Foundation
In 2021, battered and bruised supply chains got back in the game. In retrospect, it looked a lot like what the sports world calls a “rebuilding year”—one with a lot of change, a lot of attention, and muted expectations. A rebuilding year can be exciting at times, but it’s mostly exhausting, and…
How Reverse Logistics Slows 2022 Supply Chains
Media coverage of supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic has made the “average Jane or Joe” more aware of what supply chains are than ever before. Port congestion has been an almost-nightly topic on the news. But reverse logistics, or returns, is much less talked about. I recently…