The Inovis Blog

It must be spring. Easter bunnies, April showers, Mothers’ Day and tradeshows in the warm south.

I will be traveling to two trade shows in the next several weeks. The Vendor Compliance Federation (VCF) spring show in Orlando April 7-9 and the AHMA Hardlines Technology Forum in Memphis April 21-24.

I attended the fall VCF show and overall it was a great event. Many breakout sessions around “Perfect Order”, new retailer requirements around 754 and 214’s, and techniques to reverse chargebacks. There were many B2B and Compliance representatives from retailers and lots of suppliers concerned how to address their continuing chargeback issues. Great dialog from both sides – I was surprised how collaborative the conversations were. If you are a supplier, it pays to go to shows like this and get in front of the right people.

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I came across an article called Creating and Managing a Lean Supply Chain from February on AKTView’s blog, and found this blog post to be both helpful and interesting. For all of those interested in a lean supply chain (not just for large retailers as the article points out), here is some helping with getting lean.

To be lean, one must first get rid of what’s causing “extra and unneeded time, inventory and costs.” It’s all about the flow. You want a consistent flow where customers are pulling inventory instead of suppliers pushing that inventory. Anything interrupting this flow must be cut out. Here are a few of the article’s suggestions for developing a lean supply chain:

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It’s the end of March, and since this month always reminds me of green—probably because of St. Patrick’s Day and Spring—I thought I’d leave a fun green post.

According to this article on Green Supply Chain Network, McDonald’s UK reports that McDonald’s will be running its delivery fleet on 100% biodiesel that’s made from it’s own cooking oil. Now how’s THAT for creative conservation. The oil will be taken from 900 different McDonald’s restaurants and will be mixed in with pure rapeseed oil. The concoction will be 85% cooking oil and 15% rapeseed oil. The oil will then be used to fuel McDonald’s delivery vehicles.

What I find most interesting is that “the carbon saving of the move will be 1,675 tonnes annually when the national roll-out is completed—the equivelant of removing 2,424 family cars from the road each year.”

Mickey D’s, we salute you!

If you’ve read some of my past posts, you know that I’m the Director of Quality Assurance and am currently developing new software with SCRUM or the Agile Process, if you will. This is a departure from our old Waterfall Methodology, and we’ve so far been very pleased with our new method. One thing I’ve always wanted to ask our customers has to do with past developments and the developments we will make in the future.

In regards to our software, if you could have one thing improved, what would it be?