Receive this independent e-book, Improving Supply Chain Visibility via Technology, designed for SCM, IT and business professionals, and:

• Gain a full overview of the many kinds of SCM technology available today
• Solve the supply chain visibility challenge
• Justify and make the case for SCM technology investments
• Understand how compliance is driving the need for greater supply chain visibility

Download our complimentary eBook today, and gain a better foundation for managing your supply chain and improving visibility with suppliers as well as within your organization.

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The Wall Street Journal has a great article about the green sustainable global supply chain - specifically within the apparel industry – describing a new tool for consumers to determine how green their products are.

“How Green Is My Sneaker” describes a new software tool, developed by 100 retailers and apparel manufacturers, can determine the “Eco-Index” of their products. The tool calculates the score from a series of questions answered by the company and its suppliers:

The Eco Index, which is basically a software tool any apparel maker can use, poses a series of questions to companies on their environmental and labor practices—some of which require answers from the companies’ suppliers. It then assigns a score representing a percentage of a perfect score. 

The questions cover every step in the life of a product, from raw-material production to manufacturing, shipping, and even disposal. For instance, Levi’s gets points for having a recycling program that lets consumers drop off their old jeans at Goodwill, and Timberland earns points for using leather tanneries that have wastewater-purifying systems. Points are lost for using bulky packing material or transporting goods long distances. The Eco Index also includes estimates of how consumers will wash and eventually dispose of their clothes.   

Image Courtesy Wall Street Journal, Levi's. Click to view interactive version.

The tool and scoring have been in development for over three years, but roll out to the public is not expected in the immediate future – even though retailers are announcing the Eco-Index at next month’s Outdoor Retailer trade show.

Personally, I found the interactive graphic to be a great addition to the article. It shows how 1 pair of Levi’s jeans travels throughout the US and Caribbean – and even after purchase, how that one product continues to affect the environment.For example, the majority of CO2 emissions over the life-cycle of a pair of jeans come from the consumer’s washing machine & dryer.  Switching to cold water and line-drying cuts the CO2 emissions to a fraction compared to washing with hot water washing and machine-drying.

Levi’s also looks to be making a lot of progress in sustainability based on their research into the greenness of their products: 

As part of its participation in the Eco Index, Levi’s did a separate internal study of its own practices. As a result, Levi’s changed its transportation routes last year to make them more efficient and reduced carbon emissions by 700 metric tons. In addition to the Goodwill agreement, Levi’s also cut back on packaging, allowing only three pieces of labeling with the jeans—a back-pocket tag, a size sticker, and a price tag.  

In my opinion, sustainability and trade compliance are linked policies. Companies must have a plan in place for both- or else pay fines, waste money, lose time, and give up competitiveness in the marketplace.

Read the complete article at WSJ: “How Green Is My Sneaker?”

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Source: The AMR Supply Chain Top 25 for 2010

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The white paper discusses the importance of having supply chain strategy on the primary integration agenda, as it can be a fundamental value driver for a company. Additionally, when companies combine, the supply chain itself will have to adapt to potentially different suppliers, operating procedures, warehouse locations, etc.

The authors make several key points about how to overcome supply chain challenges when dealing with a merger:

The imperatives for true and lasting success with supply chain integrations are few; yet their achievement is challenging. The real keys to success in integrating supply chains in M&A are:

• Assign strong and experienced team leaders;
• Focus on enabling the business and operations strategies;
• Decide on the new organization and processes with the right criteria;
• Apply sound principles and best practices to all the work; and
• Establish a performance-based culture and a self-assessing DNA.

To learn more, please download the full white paper here.

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Management Dynamics, a leading provider of Global Trade Management solutions, today announced that Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE: ANF), a specialty retailer of casual apparel for men, women, and kids, implemented its Supply Chain Visibility solution to provide real-time visibility into the status of orders, shipments and in-transit inventory. The global, multimode visibility solution will allow its logistics team to streamline its supply chain process from vendor to distribution center and collaborate with merchants and service providers to reduce costs, shipment delays and improve customer service.

Abercrombie & Fitch selected Management Dynamics for its industry experience in delivering supply chain visibility solutions as well as its advanced data quality management capabilities. With 30 trading partners and multiple international business units, Abercrombie & Fitch’s logistics team needed a single, detailed level view of shipments and orders in-transit to track, manage exceptions, proactively pinpoint in-transit delays and respond to any potential logistics crisis. Integrating with its Oracle Retail Merchandising System, Management Dynamics’ Supply Chin Visibility solution allows merchants to monitor the delivery status of key orders and for the logistics team to proactively manage inbound shipments by milestones. And, with accurate shipment information earlier in the supply chain, Abercrombie & Fitch is able to improve store-level inventory allocations to reduce cycle time and achieve higher levels of availability.

“We needed to create reliability in our global supply chain with the ability respond to actual and potential issues and tightly collaborate with our merchants, distribution centers and service providers,” said Lois Davis, Vice President Global Trade & Transportation, Abercrombie & Fitch. “We chose Management Dynamics for their supply chain experience, ability to ensure data quality and problem resolution focused approach. Their hosted solution saves valuable time and effort, provides meaningful cost reductions, optimizes our shipping options, and improves our customer service.”

Management Dynamics’ Supply Chain Visibility solution supports the key requirements of the logistics operations at Abercrombie & Fitch including:

• One central location for tracking critical shipment information across multiple sources, providing visibility to inventory in-transit and speeding the flow of goods from distribution to merchants.
• Advance notice of shipment information to improve cross-border logistics decisions.
• Proprietary Data Quality Management (DQM) technologies and business methodologies to ensure best-in-class information accuracy, completeness and timeliness for all messages exchanged between trading partners.
• Event alerting capabilities that anticipate potential inventory receipt and fulfillment issues and prompt rapid resolution before they impact availability.
• Robust functionality for measuring, analyzing and improving the performance of suppliers, carriers and service providers with user-defined reports, scorecards and KPIs based on frontline data.

“In high fashion with ever-changing seasons and consumer tastes by region, it is critical for specialty retailers to tightly manage the inbound supply chain from vendor to distribution center and ultimately to improve store-level fulfillment metrics,” said Jim Preuninger, CEO of Management Dynamics. “Abercrombie & Fitch understands the importance of building a strong infrastructure to support collaborative logistics processes and selected our Supply Chain Visibility solution based on a track record of delivery in this area. We look forward to helping this leading apparel retailer to establish transparency across its global supply chain and realize their operational objectives.”

About Abercrombie & Fitch

Abercrombie & Fitch Co., through its subsidiaries, operates as a specialty retailer of casual sportswear apparel for men, women, and kids. The company’s stores offer knit and woven shirts, graphic t-shirts, fleece, jeans and woven pants, shorts, sweaters, and outerwear, as well as personal care products and accessories under the Abercrombie & Fitch, abercrombie, and Hollister. It also offers bras, underwear, personal care products, sleepwear, and at-home products for women under the Gilly Hicks brand. As of December 16, 2009, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. operated over 1,100 stores in the United States, Canada, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. It also sells its products through Web-based stores, as well as through a catalogue. The company was founded in 1892 and is headquartered in New Albany, Ohio

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As companies become more global, increasing and expanding operations all over the world, it becomes very difficult to manually manage supply chain processes. Especially when employees are spread out across multiple locations. GTM technologies allow users to seamlessly communicate with trading partners,  manage suppliers, optimize global transportation, ensure trade compliance, automate key aspects of trade finance, and develop timely resolutions of operational issues.

To be more specific, a supply chain visibility solution can provide shippers with near-real time visibility to the status of orders, shipments and in-transit inventory to optimize their network. Without a system in place, companies may be handcuffed with longer lead times, higher inventory levels,  budget overruns, and continued supply-demand imbalances. Furthermore, with regulations such as the Importer Security Filing (aka 10+2), it is more important than ever to have more visibility and control over what happens at origin. (And speaking of ISF, check out how Bunzl Distribution integrated a supply chain visibility solution with a trade import solution to establish a transparent and compliant import supply chain.)

The bottom line is that we are moving into an era where manual supply chain processes are becoming inept for companies who import or export. To learn more about how different types of GTM technologies can benefit your organization, please download one of Management Dynamics’ GTM Success eKits.

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EAST RUTHERFORD, NJ, January 13, 2010 — Management Dynamics, a leading provider of global trade management solutions, today announced that Fiesta Gas Grills, one of the largest North American grill manufacturers, has implemented its Supply Chain Visibility solution to support its expanded global procurement operations. Integrating its sourcing which is primarily from China to its operations in the United States and Canada, the global multi-mode solution has enabled Fiesta to improve customer service, reduce cycle times, better manage suppliers and proactively identify in-transit delivery issues.

“We needed a solution that provided visibility into our manufacturing and distribution process at the supplier level, the ability to generate commercial documents and a platform on which to coordinate all of our global operations. We found the ideal solution with Management Dynamics,” said Peter Perley, COO, Fiesta Gas Grills. “The Supply Chain Visibility solution could help us to double our business this year without having to add additional staff to our procurement organization.”

Management Dynamics’ Supply Chain Visibility (SCV) solution connects Fiesta Gas Grills with its multiple overseas suppliers, logistics providers, brokers and carriers on a single global platform to communicate critical purchase order, shipment and inventory information and to support collaborative logistics processes. With real-time shipment visibility, Fiesta can offer its national retail customers, order tracking with visibility into nine stages of the manufacturing process for better inventory management with less frequency of stock-outs. In addition, armed with essential information on each shipment from its suppliers, Fiesta’s procurement operations can make accurate decisions relating to diverting inventory or resolving bottlenecks.

“Global supply chain teams need real-time visibility to their supply network, yet the realities of today’s global supply chain – multiple trading partners with varying information systems and data definitions – can create major operational challenges for companies,”said Nathan Pieri, SVP Marketing and Product Management for Management Dynamics. “By moving from a largely manual manufacturing and logistics process to one that is automated infrastructure with Supply Chain Visibility, Fiesta Gas Grills has the control and decision support tools they need to reduce lead times, enhance customer service and increase sales in this difficult economy.”

About Fiesta Gas Grills LLC

Through quality craftsmanship and innovative designs Fiesta has become one of the largest North American grill manufacturers. Fiesta grills are cooking great outdoor meals in over 30 countries around the world.. Whether its our award winning Blue Ember brand, our Fiesta brand or our Grillrite brand our dedication to quality permeates our company. From the design teams through the manufacturing team to the in-house customer service representatives, every member of the Fiesta family is committed to providing each owner of a Fiesta grill “the best grill under the sun” and the ultimate in outdoor cooking experience.

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“What we’re starting to see,” says [Karl Manrodt, Associate Professor at Georgia Southern], “is senior management … trying to understand what those metrics are and should be.” The desire to monitor one’s own performance, so prevalent in school, never really goes away. At the same time, “it’s important for us to communicate what’s critical … to customers and suppliers. Let’s manage to that.”

Unfortunately many supply chain teams struggle to access data in multiple sources and formats and do not have access to the latest business intelligence tools. Implementing a Performance Management solution that integrates with your supply chain visibility and trade compliance processes can give companies the insight to make better-informed strategic decisions and improve supply chain performance.

Management Dynamics has a Performance Management solution that offers several important capabilities:

• A portal to schedule reports, alert users when new reports are available and to distribute polished deliverable documents.
• A dashboard to provide a consolidated view of key performance indicators and reports along with extensive personalization options.
• Over 80 standard reports are available across all supported modules to manage key metrics such as cycle time, trading partner performance, landed cost, and data quality. Users also have the ability to create their own customized reports.
• A web-based reporting tool to perform ad-hoc queries and multi-dimensional analyses with the ability to drill to operational details. Reports can be quickly customized by dragging and dropping data, inserting calculations, and adding graphs.
• A business intelligence platform for developing strategic reports, analytics, KPI metrics, scorecards and personal and corporate dashboards.
• Ability to scorecard carrier performance, compare transit times, analyze pricing trends, and track the history of all transaction costs through an end-to-end audit capability.

To learn more about this solution, please visit our website.

For more details on the study, please read this article on SupplyChainBrain (includes a link to a video interview).

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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.

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