American Shipper’s Global Transportation Management Benchmark Study: Climbing the Visibility Sophistication Ladder, found that successful shippers and their service partners are investing in supply chain visibility to deal with their growing and complex supply chains. In fact, 66% of shippers and 75% of forwarders were able to quantify an ROI from their visibility investment!

The idea of industry segmentation argues that companies need to execute separate strategies for commodities and newer, innovative goods – the demand structures certainly differ. Supply chain segmentation is no different, and SCM World delves into this critical, but underutilized, business process in their brand new report, “Supply Chain Segmentation: The Key to Future Profitability.”

Amber Road announced today that GE will use its Global Trade Management (GTM) solution to centralize and automate trade functions worldwide across all eight of its business units.

Even as companies go global, supply chain challenges remain. Large, complex and sometimes unpredictable trading networks can adversely affect revenues and the ability to compete for new customers in new markets. Recently, Amber Road commissioned SCM World to conduct a survey of the landscape and issues facing supply chain professionals as they manage their global trade.

Levi Strauss & Co. used to run its global supply chain processes manually, with logistics directors in San Francisco relying on Asian suppliers for periodic freight-location updates. As you can imagine, putting a picture together of all those moving pieces was rather complicated for such a prominent apparel company.

Companies of all sizes are struggling to deal with the effects that globalization is having on their supply chains. Changing virtually every inbound-to-outbound process as a result of global expansion is causing quite a few headaches. Where do you even start? Which changes will produce the highest ROI?

Don’t miss out on Amber Road’s upcoming webinar broadcasting live on Tuesday, September 24 at 11:30am EDT on Crate and Barrel’s Holistic Supply Chain and the Role of Supply Chain Visibility.

The term “global trade management” used to mean one thing: compliance. Not anymore. Ty Bordner, VP of Product Management & Solutions Consulting at Amber Road, describes how GTM today embraces the whole experience of moving goods across borders: regulation, duty management, logistics, and, most of all, global supply-chain visibility.

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.

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.”