How Home Renovation Projects Have Exposed Supply Chain Fragility

Posted on October 14, 2020 by Graham Freeman

Like many people around the world, you’ve probably been working from home for the past six months. Perhaps you’ve also been monitoring your children as they navigate the improvised labyrinth of online learning. All day, every day, you’ve been immersed in your home environment far more than you ever thought you would be. It seems like you’re constantly preparing food, loading the dishwasher, doing laundry, getting snacks, and engaging in a seemingly infinite number of other mundane activities that have turned your quiet home into a concerto for frazzled knowledge-worker soloist and obsolete-appliance orchestra.

If this is you, then perhaps your familiarity with your home has bred contempt for its flaws. Perhaps, you reason, if you’re to be imprisoned in your home during the dreaded second wave of the pandemic, it’s time to switch things up a bit, time to retire your veteran appliances and draft in a new generation … Read more...

HelloFresh Is Using Technology To Take a Huge Bite Out of a Multitrillion Dollar Industry

Posted on September 14, 2020 by Sandy Smith

When families are counting on you for dinner, an unreliable supply chain is not an option. HelloFresh focuses on every step of the farm-to-door journey, shipping meal kits to millions of Americans, each filled with all of the ingredients necessary to prepare three to five different meals.

I recently found out how HelloFresh is using technology to reduce waste, improve quality processes and streamline supplier relations, all while doubling orders and revenue year-over-year.

It’s estimated that 40 percent of the food supply in the United States goes to waste because of over-portioning and wasteful distribution. Because of the attention to correct portioning, HelloFresh reduces the dinner food waste of its customers by at least 21 percent, resulting in a staggering reduction of food waste each week.

The company has over 2,500 employees in the United States who provide millions of meals that are carefully planned, carefully sourced and delivered … Read more...

Suppliers Want You to Be Their Customer of Choice

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Peter-Elias Alouche

Is your company recognized by its suppliers as a Customer of Choice? What exactly does this distinction mean and why is it important? A Customer of Choice is a customer recognized by many of its suppliers as a preferred customer for a number of reasons. From their talented workforce and integrated management systems to their global processes and approach to supplier collaboration, customers that can achieve this distinction can unlock new sources of competitive advantage with the help of their suppliers.

When suppliers recognize that they have a Customer of Choice on their hands, they have a tendency to go out of their way to service that particular customer’s needs. In these situations, suppliers will assign their most talented employees, allocate scarce resources, provide additional discounts, prioritize production capacity, give early access to new products, and go out of their way to solve customer problems so that their customers can … Read more...

5 Reasons to Keep Suppliers & Buyers in the Loop

Posted on September 22, 2016 by Peter-Elias Alouche

Organizations love to make design changes to their products on a regular basis. Any firm producing a product, be it the Tesla Model S or McDonald’s French fries, strives to introduce incremental improvements to add new features, reduce costs, comply with the latest regulations, and remain competitive. Sometimes these changes have an impact on suppliers.

Tesla just released its Version 8 software that introduces over 200+ enhancements for the Model S Autopilot technology. Some of these changes will have an impact on Tesla’s suppliers due to integration between purchased components and Tesla’s design.

In 2008, McDonald’s formally announced it changed its recipe for French Fries by changing to trans-fat-free oil to address general health concerns over cardiovascular disease. Imagine the impact of this change to the supplier providing the trans-fat oil from a capacity, inventory, and profit standpoint.

The impact that design changes have on suppliers is significant. Let’s take … Read more...

3 Ways It Pays to Turn Suppliers Into Partners

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Peter-Elias Alouche

Have you ever stopped to think about how important your suppliers are to your business? Do you view suppliers as business partners and an extension of your business, or do you see them as a reactive service provider that exists to fulfill demand?

All too often we tend to treat supplier relationships as contractual agreements rather than mutually beneficial partnerships. This behavior grossly under-estimates the tremendous benefit suppliers can provide to your firm’s day-to-day operations. This “servant” paradigm is not the right way to go about conducting business with suppliers for a number of reasons. Instead, let’s talk about three key reasons why we need a fundamental shift in our thinking away from the supplier “servant” paradigm to suppliers being members of a critical department in your organization – a key business function that adds value for your customers on a daily basis.

Reason # 1: Start with Trust

Relationships … Read more...

Webinar: Deriving Value from Your Supply Chain

Posted on August 20, 2014 by JP Nadeau

Businesses are increasingly trying to cultivate sustainable supply chains, and many are realizing that making environmental considerations a cornerstone of supply chain management can actually boost overall profit margins. However, companies that want to link sustainability efforts and profitability sometimes encounter problems gaining visibility into the relationship between the two. But that’s about to get a whole lot easier, thanks to this insightful, free 30 minute webinar.

Key topics covered include:

How to develop a sustainable supply chain program that merges environmental goals with financial profitability
How to establish informed, relevant environmental key performance indicators (KPI) and build sustainability goals
Leveraging environmental scorecards to rank supply chain processes and suppliers based on key metrics

Watch a preview below or click here to watch the full webinar.