The Inovis Blog

Managing your business community is an ongoing challenge facing many retailers in today’s marketplace. Retailers need to work with their suppliers to improve the quality of the shared business processes and maximize the profits seen by both sides. Many retailers see community management and vendor onboarding as a burden, as for some it is a manual process. It can also be a frequent one, as retailers are often adding partners on a frequent basis. Not to mention, midsize retailers may have 4-5 staff members for over 2000 partners, giving each staff member 400-500 partners to manage.

Today’s businesses need to roll with the rapid changes facing B2B transactions by communicating with their suppliers. Keeping vendors in the loop on compliance changes or changes to vendor guides is crucial to keeping costs down while maintaining the efficiency of the supply chain. It’s hard to sell the goods if you have changed your vendor guides without communicating it and the goods aren’t there yet due to a data-related error. Certifying your vendors, using scorecards and automating the onboarding process is crucial to keeping the supply chain rolling smoothly.

Image Source: http://www.rtpi.org.uk

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I am an avid reader of history. I often compare items I read to modern day. I recently read a book on Rome, and now I am reading the 2nd in a three-part series of the Civil War by Shelby Foote. It amazes me how countries could support an Army that far away from their home, not to mention in enemy territory. Granted, once some of these armies got too far from home they faltered due to lack of supplies. Rome is the truly astonishing one to me. To conquer everything they did, in that era, they had to have a lengthy supply chain. You can only live off the land so much; you need supplies from home. Uniforms, weapons, food, etc. That is a long supply chain they have to keep protected and operating to keep their war machine running.

Image Credit: http://web.ics.purdue.edu

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Image Credit: http://www.csj.org

With the exception of our Question of the Week post every Friday, the majority of our blogs usually involve the Inovis bloggers sharing knowledge and opinions about supply chain related matters. Today, I’d like to turn the tables. With gas prices at an all time high and inflation with other commodities as well, it’s certainly an interesting time for the Supply Chain Field. There are many issues and challenges at the moment, and an equal amount of solutions being offered to combat these issues.

That being said, which solutions or techniques do you think are most valuable to help businesses at the moment? Actionable Intelligence, Supply Chain Visibility, Business Community Management, Lean Manufacturing, Just in Time Inventory, Cross Docking, green practices, or something else? What are companies doing correctly, or perhaps lacking in their strategy? Do you think these are trying times, or over hyped?

I look forward to your opinion.

2008 has shaped up to be a great year for movies thus far. In addition to the release of the recent blockbuster hit Iron Man, the highly anticipated Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be released May 22 and Edward Norton will do his best this coming June to convince us he’s a worthy Incredible Hulk. Another great movie to look forward to is Get Smart with none other than Steve Carrell. Maxwell Smart seems a suitable role to compliment his comedic talents, and who didn’t love this classic sitcom?

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