Four out of the Top Five Companies in this Year’s Gartner Top 25 Supply Chains use Amber Road

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Kelsey Price

Gartner

Congratulations to the accomplished companies included in Gartner’s most recent Supply Chain Top 25, which included nine Amber Road customers! (Four of the top five, in fact, use Amber Road.) Gartner’s annual report identifies demand-driven leadership on the journey to integrated, innovative supply chains.

Amber Road’s customers have always fared well on Gartner’s list; nine customers also made it to the Top 25 in 2012. This year, companies like McDonald’s, Unilever, Intel, Cisco Systems, Dell, Wal-Mart, Starbucks and Qualcomm topped the list with help from Amber Road’s global trade management solutions in optimizing their supply chains.

Gartner picked out several trends that emerged among the leaders: “finding new synergies across best practices, partnering more productively for growth and inspiring the hearts and minds of their supply chain talent in new ways.”

Congrats again to all those included in Gartner’s report! You can find the full list, along with Gartner’s many insights, here.

Brown-Forman Grows its Spirited Exports Program with Amber Road

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Kelsey Price

It may be hard to believe that one of the world’s largest producers of wines and spirits once lacked visibility of its ocean shipments and carrier performance levels. But back in 2004, Brown-Forman had to rely on the tracking systems of individual carriers to keep tabs on product in transit, with no single platform to monitor the movement of popular brands like Jack Daniel’s, Southern Comfort, and Korbel.

Brown-Forman began looking for a software suite that could provide a central repository while navigating the highly regulated alcoholic beverage industry, where strict records are essential. The company picked Amber Road (then Management Dynamics).

Brown-Forman quickly gained some unsettling insights into its supply chain. For example, the company had thought its distributors were taking between three and five days to clear their goods and get them unloaded. However, it sometimes took up to 10 days. With Amber Road’s solution, the company was able to determine when its containers were being released to customers.

“It has helped us to secure our supply chain, giving us visibility from beginning to end,” says Sherree Hockensmith, International Transportation Manager at Brown-Forman. “We now have tools to slice and dice our data anyway we need to.”

The company now knows great deal about the actual services levels it receives from its carriers, and can track its containers from production facilities in Kentucky and Virginia all the way to destination.

To find out more about Brown-Forman’s success with Amber Road, please read this SupplyChainBrain feature.

Recent Trends in Adoption of Supply Chain Software

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Jim Preuninger

If the Supply Chain can’t be Simplified, New Strategies are Needed to Account for the Complexity

Recently, attendees at the Amber Road user conference had the opportunity to hear William McNeill, Senior Research Analyst at Gartner, speak about global trade trends and priorities. In particular, Mr. McNeill cited a survey of “Supply Chain Digest” readers conducted by Gartner that focused on the adoption of supply chain software. (For more observations on this study, see Dan Gilmore’s comments here.)

The survey of 259 senior supply chain executives found that nearly 35% of respondents identified supply chain visibility and event management (SCVEM) as the most important supply chain management (SCM) and execution (SCE) application for acquisition in 2014.

Of respondents that saw SCVEM as a strategic advantage for their business, 13% had purchased software as a service (SaaS) or cloud-based applications in the past and 26% expected to in the future. This seems to indicate that the companies that see the strategic value of SCVEM initiatives recognize that the best way to integrate with the third-parties that provide visibility data is through ubiquitous online access.

McNeill noted that many organizations are accustomed to exchanging information with supply chain partners through electronic data interchange (EDI). These companies have already seen the strategic value of sharing information with an extended network of supply chain partners and are willing to take the next step to cloud technologies.

In contrast, among those organizations that view supply chain visibility as a cost of doing business, only 5% have purchased SaaS applications and only 15% intend to do so in the future.

When asked about the top three obstacles to achieving their organization’s overall supply chain goals and objectives, 41% of respondents chose “difficulty or inability to coordinate and synchronize end-to-end supply chain processes” as one of their chief obstacles. Thirty-seven percent chose “lack of visibility across the supply chain” and 35% chose “supply chain network complexity.”

In contrast to the previous year’s study, the percentage of respondents citing supply chain network complexity as one of their top obstacles increased by 11%. McNeill sees this as an indication that while the supply chain is actually becoming more complex, supply chain leaders understand that they have to adjust their approach to deal with this inherent complexity. If it can’t be simplified, new strategies are needed to account for complexity.

One way to address these issues is with a SaaS/cloud based solution that integrates partner and visibility data into a comprehensive view of the supply chain. The survey data bears this out with the number of organizations that view online solutions as strategic business enablers and as a way to manage supply chain complexity.

Managing Multiple Sourcing in Your Global Trade Management Solution

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Ty Bordner

Procurement, Compliance and Logistics Professionals all play Important Roles in ordering Products

Global importers simply don’t have the option of depending on a single supplier for a variety of items. Both the demands of supply chain resiliency and the reality of maintaining stock levels make it necessary to obtain the same item from multiple suppliers. Particularly if you are a global retailer or manufacturer with distributed outlets or plants, it’s neither practical nor possible to source all units from a single vendor.

This is where the concept of multiple sourcing comes in — literally buying items from more than one source. While multiple sourcing is straightforward in theory, as a practice it is more complex from a global trade management perspective, including implications for landed cost, compliance and logistics.

Consider the example of a large global retailer that is purchasing a basic white t-shirt for thousands of retail outlets located in ten countries. The retailer has four different suppliers, each in a different country, capable of fulfilling t-shirt orders. What are the implications of placing an order with each of these suppliers to ensure adequate global stock levels of the white t-shirt?

Landed cost — Each shipment of shirts will have a different landed cost associated with it since it will be coming from and to a different country. Freight, insurance, duties and taxes all play a role in determining landed cost, and there may also be preferential trade programs, countervailing or anti-dumping duties in place between some of these countries.
Compliance — Each country has different regulations in place for importation of the white t-shirt. This can include rules around fiber content, bleaches or chemicals used in the manufacturing process, labeling requirements and subtleties in product classification. Agencies other than Customs may be involved, and each government has its own set of import filing forms and rules.
Logistics — Getting the shirts from manufacturer to retail outlet is no small task. Each shipment must be rated and booked, and multiple land and sea carriers will need to be managed and tracked.

A global trade management system should inherently and intuitively approach the complexities of multiple sourcing of goods at the product level. This means that it needs to store information about the multiple sources and account for all the permutations in a single product record. It also needs to perform import cost calculations and check compliance for all the relevant country of import/country of export combinations.

Final Thoughts

Procurement, compliance and logistics professionals all play important roles in ordering products. Access to a centralized repository of sourcing information via a GTM system makes it possible for these professionals to place orders in an efficient and compliant manner.

Using a Supply Chain Control Tower to Become Your Own 4PL

Posted on July 5, 2012 by Ty Bordner

For Some Companies, it Might be the Natural Outcome of Centralizing Supply Chain Operations and Data into a Control Tower

As more organizations are moving toward heightened supply chain visibility, many are coming to realize that what they’re also doing is becoming their own fourth-party logistics (4PL) provider. What’s a 4PL? The term was coined by Accenture (when it was Andersen Consulting) and is defined as “an integrator that assembles the resources, capabilities, and technology of its own organization and other organizations to design, build and run comprehensive supply chain solutions.”

Essentially, a 4PL is like a general contractor for logistics. Typically, it is a neutral party that will help unify and reengineer supply chain processes, while coordinating the activities of 3PLs and other supply chain partners. However, companies that have embraced supply chain as a core competency are seeing value in assuming the 4PL role themselves to meet their specific supply chain goals. The activities are managed from centralized hubs of technology, people and processes – frequently called “control towers.”

The concept of a supply chain control tower has been gaining momentum over the past year. A control tower is a single command center for visibility, decision-making and action, based on real-time data. With a control tower in place, taking on the 4PL role allows organizations to accelerate collaboration and achieve higher levels of performance among their varied providers.

In addition, centralizing supply chain data and processes as a self-4PL gives companies the flexibility to plug in new logistics providers using standard interfaces and configurable processes. This eliminates lock-in with a particular 3PL or system and puts the company in a position to control interactions with trade partners. Control tower managers gain deeper visibility and can use data-driven analysis of service levels to objectively manage each provider.

Further, by collecting and analyzing data from supply chain processes, managers can measure performance according to standard metrics. With business intelligence tools, managers can perform “what-if” analyses to optimize sourcing or distribution decisions, pinpoint a process breakdown that results in excess inventory, and right-size inventory based on actual cycle times and variability.

Final Thoughts

Being a self-4PL may not be right for companies that don’t yet have the resources or expertise to manage all aspects of their logistics and supply chain. But for others, it might be the natural outcome of centralizing supply chain operations and data into a control tower.