- Guest post by Kyle Meissner, Sachs Marketing Group -
Payment processing has come a long way in the past few years. Customers have more options than ever before to house their money. Businesses have to make sure that their system reaches out to all its customers to successfully complete transactions. As new technologies emerge, businesses need to stay on top of the experience. Continue reading
The concept of Cost to Serve has been around for many years (to my knowledge at least 20) and is an important tool in consumer packaged goods industries. Cost to Serve is a method of identifying profitability of individual products and customers. It is also used to unravel the complexity of multiple supply chains and channels to market. The analysis of the cost of each activity across the supply chain also provides data and insights to enable supply chain optimisation.
The focus of Cost to Serve is usually the in-market or post-launch costs of serving a product to a customer. Cost to Serve rarely looks at the development and launch costs of new products, which is the focus of this article. Yet product development teams can gain benefit from Cost to Serve methodology. Continue reading
A recent post in Purchasing Insight, “What can game theory teach us about Financial Supply Chain Management?” highlights the overall financial impact of paying suppliers as late as possible. The key point is that the working capital cost to supplier usually far outweighs the savings to the customer, thereby increasing the overall cost to the supply chain. The post got me thinking about a much bigger issue: how businesses manage their supply chains – a cross-functional collaboration or a collection of functional silos? Continue reading
This blog is inspired by Rudi Verheyden who posted a question “Does Supply Chain LEANness mean that the Supply Chain organisation is also agile, or are these 2 elements rather conflicting or independent from each other ?” in the Supply Chain Optimization Group on LinkedIn. (The same question is also posted in the Inspired Supply Chain & Logistics Executives Group but at time of writing had no comments.)
This is a very big question, with many facets to be explored. I look forward to following the discussion. My immediate thoughts are that there is some conflict, some consistency and some dependency. Continue reading
This is the sixth in a series of articles on how to implement and enhance a gate process. The series offers advice in the context of consumer products. This article is a summary of the first 5 Articles together with my 7 top tips. Continue reading
This is the fifth in a series of articles on how to implement and enhance a gate process (also known as stage gate process). The series sets out to highlight some of the issues associated with the introduction and operation of gate processes, and to offer some advice in the context of consumer products. Continue reading
Today I ask, “How are you to know that your procurement ‘cost saving’ initiative will not deliver to the bottom line?”
Regular readers of my blog will know that, recently, I wrote a series of articles on the reasons why, when many large organisations embark on centralised procurement initiatives with the promise of substantial savings, direct increases in profitability fail to materialize within the business units. Continue reading
This is the fourth in a series of articles on how to implement and enhance a gate process (also known as stage gate process). The series sets out to highlight some of the issues associated with the introduction and operation of gate processes, and to offer some advice in the context of consumer products. Continue reading