Happy Holidays!
I’d like to wish everyone out there a wonderful holiday season and a prosperous new year. Also, thanks everybody who has been reading my blog this year!
Archive for December 2009
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Automating the Import Supply Chain at Leggett & Platt
Automating the import supply chain today is complicated by new compliance regulations like Customs 10+2 and C-TPAT. In this interview with Global Logistics & Supply Chain Strategies magazine, VP Customs Compliance at Leggett & Platt discusses best practices for import compliance and for transforming a fragmented global procurement approach into a centralized global import process:
Ocean World Lines Sails Ahead with New Order Tracking Portal Powered by Management Dynamics’ Supply Chain Visibility Solution
Leading NVOCC Launches OWL360° to Offer Comprehensive Value-added Service to Customers
EAST RUTHERFORD, NJ, December 17, 2009 — Management Dynamics, a leading provider of global trade management solutions, today announced that Ocean World Lines (OWL), a leading non-vessel operating common carrier (NVOCC), has launched OWL360°, an order, shipment and inventory tracking portal powered by Management Dynamics’ Supply Chain Visibility solution. This robust and flexible web-based solution allows OWL to provide comprehensive and timely data on purchase orders and shipments across all modes and trade lanes, enabling customers to analyze and improve their supply chain efficiency.
“The highly flexible nature of the OWL360° system allows us to easily adapt to market conditions and our clients’ changing needs as we continue to differentiate, provide added value to our customers and stay ahead of our competitors,” said Alan Baer, President, Ocean World Lines. “We truly value our partnership with Management Dynamics as we work together to continuously create enhancements to the system and additional benefits to the user which has significantly improved our customer loyalty and retention.”
Prior to integrating Management Dynamics’ Supply Chain Visibility solution, OWL’s tracking system was a highly manual process whereas operations personnel input data received from carriers and performed manual queries. With EDI connectivity, automated alerts and reports, the new OWL360° portal automates this process and has significantly improved internal productivity. Today, over 200 customers have seamlessly integrated OWL360° within their supply chain operations. OWL uses analysis and reporting tools to help clients improve their supply chain performance with accurate and timely visibility into the status of their orders across all U.S. and international trade lanes.
“While many companies lack critical supply chain visibility due to highly manual processes or first generation visibility solutions that lack the sophistication to accurately manage inventory in-transit, best-in-class companies such as OWL are adopting advanced technologies that help streamline the supply chain,” said Nathan Pieri, SVP Marketing & Product Management, Management Dynamics. “OWL fully exploits the power of our Supply Chain Visibility solution and delivers a highly differentiated service to its customers.”
In addition to Supply Chain Visibility, OWL utilizes Management Dynamics’ Transportation Management solution to automate ocean pricing and manage service contracts as well as Management Dynamics’ on-demand trade compliance tools to help customers classify goods, calculate landed costs and screen for restricted parties.
About Ocean World Lines
Ocean World Lines is a leading global transportation company providing full-service ocean/air freight, NVOCC, customs brokerage, cargo management and supply chain visibility solutions, with 100,000+ TEUs shipped annually. Established in 1979, OWL’s long-standing relationships with leading ocean carriers enable the company to provide the most competitive pricing, daily sailing schedules and equipment availability for a diverse list of import and export clients. Ocean World Lines operates 12 offices throughout the U.S. and international offices in Germany, United Kingdom and Asia. For more information, please visit www.owlusa.com or call (888) 747-4685.
Please follow this link to learn more about the benefits of Supply Chain Visibility.
Teamwork Between Two Competitors Leads to Greater Benefits
Here’s a cool story I found about two competitors working together for a greater benefit: Nestlé and Mars join forces in logistics collaboration. Nestle and Mars are sharing trucks to deliver combined loads of chocolate. In the past 11 weeks, over 60 loads have been combined, and approximately 7,500 miles of duplicate truck journeys have been eliminated. Not only to both companies save money by doing this, the overall environmental impact has been reduced. Big props to Nestle and Mars!
2009 SCM Virtual Conference Sessions Available On Demand
Logistics Management’s 2009 Next Generation Supply Chain Virtual Conference sessions are now available on-demand. Topics include: the supply chain as a revenue generator, the 14th Annual 3PL study, Technology’s role in the green supply chain, transportation management’s role in the supply chain, and software as a service.
Free Online Tool Helps Farmers Secure Their Supply Chains, Compliments of Uncle Sam
The U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service have created a free online tool, called Agriculture CARVER + Shock, which will allow farmers and producers identify vulnerable areas in their supply chains. Stephen F. Sundlof, director of FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, is quoted in an American Shipper article about the new tool:
“This assessment tool helps the producer understand how someone intending to disrupt agriculture might think” … “Producers can easily identify weak spots in their operation and receive practical advice on countermeasures they can put in place.”
To learn more about this online tool, or to download the software, please visit this website.
GTM in a Flash: Automating the Import Supply Chain
Today, importers must deal with end-to-end supply chain accountability and are increasingly challenged to have visibility and control over their supply base and origin operations. Here is a short video gives a good overview of how GTM technology can help companies manage these complexities of going global by automating their inbound processes, improving regulatory compliance and attaining landed cost objectives:
The Benefits of Software as a Service
Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions have been something that organizations have been turning to for a while, to manage various IT and operational functions in their organization. In a recent Logistics Management article, Software as a Service (SaaS): The versatile supply chain option, Adrian Gonzalez of ARC Advisory Group discusses some of the benefits of using SaaS.
Boasting shorter implementation times than “purchase and install” options, and less upfront investment, SaaS solutions are particularly useful for shippers that are in the process of “upgrading existing solutions, or in need of new solutions.”
…According to Gonzalez, SaaS appeals to companies of all sizes, and across most industries. He also discussed pricing options, noting that they range from upfront license fees to payments-per-transaction. Most common, he says, is a one-year to three-year subscription model with monthly payments.
In the article, Gonzalez names Transportation Management Systems (TMS) and Global Trade Management (GTM) systemsas the two software packages that are most applicable for SaaS. Using a Transportation Management solution can help shippers manage global airfreight and sea freight contracts, optimize booking decisions by finding the best combination of cost and service, and automate the freight audit process to identify and eliminate invoice overcharges. Logistics providers can see benefits as well – TMS can help them manage buy-side costs, automate quote and proposal generation, comply with tariff filing requirements, and improve sales effectiveness.
Some other GTM solutions, such as Supply Chain Visibility and Trade Portals, address the challenge managing multiple trading partners, all with different information systems and data definitions, and information that can flow at unpredictable times.
Wanted: Supplier Collaboration
The Business Performance Management (BPM) Forum and the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council recently did a survey on approximately 400 executives, many from companies worth more than $1B. They determined that while most organizations understand that supply chain collaboration should be a top priority, most have yet to achieve it.
Logistics Management has summed up the study findings:
“According to the survey results, the problem is pretty widespread. About 50 percent of the respondents said they were focusing on collaboration “at some level,” but that only 5 percent were actually doing it end-to-end. In addition, 75 percent said they have “no ability” or “an unsatisfactory ability” to extend and leverage their internal systems to suppliers and outsourced service providers. And 26 percent of respondents say they share customer data and insights with partners to enable innovation.”
The key to a synchronized supply chain is to extend processes to all trading partners to work off of one set of documents and eliminating errors due to losing a document or re-keying information into a secondary system. If an organization is not well-connected to their suppliers, forwarders, and Customs brokers, then this synchronized supply chain is not easy to achieve. Using automated solutions such as Supplier PO Management and Supplier Solicitation Portals from Management Dynamics new Trade Portals product line, can help you collaborate with your trading partners to ensure you don’t fall into that 75%.
To learn more about our Supplier Portals solutions, please send us an email (Solutions@ManagementDynamics.com) or visit our website.
To read the full article from Logistics Management, mentioned above, please follow this link.
Strategic Opportunities that 10+2 Presents
Recent research shows that the average cost per Importer Security Filing is $30.* With large importers filing 5,000 ISFs or more per year, the cost of compliance totals to upwards of $150,000 and provides no ROI other than penalty avoidance.
In this short video, Ty Bordner, VP of Solutions Consulting at Management Dynamics discusses some of the strategic opportunities that ISF Compliance can presen
t to an organization, including:
- Reducing the effort of complying with Customs 10+2
- Minimizing errors upon entry by linking to ISFs
- Eliminating manually re-keying data
- Preventing potential penalties of $5,000 per ISF
- Reducing broker fees (on average, $30 per ISF)
- Managing the import process with complete visibility from origin, through customs, to the final destination
*Source: American Shipper ISF Benchmark Study
