With increasing access to, and demand from, overseas markets, today’s SME’s are ideally poised to realize the immense opportunity and lucrative potential that lies in exporting their products. Typically, though, small and medium-size businesses don’t have the resources – financial, operational or otherwise – to move beyond their own locally established domestic markets and meet with compliance needs, no matter how great the prospect of new international market expansion. READ MORE
The rising dollar, caused in large part by the termination of the Fed’s long-running bond-buying program, has become a key theme among economists, financiers, entrepreneurs and politicians. While the rising dollar is good news for those planning to travel to countries with currencies depreciating against the U.S. dollar and for U.S. workers sending remittances to family abroad, this might not be good news for the U.S. economy – mainly U.S. exporters and multinationals. READ MORE
According to a recent study commissioned by Blur Group, 87 percent of U.S. decision makers in procurement and vendor management agreed that they would like to partner with new service providers, though 71 percent felt they had little freedom to develop new partnerships. READ MORE
Today’s modern supply chains are not linear, but dynamic and multi-directional – and the digital solutions currently available to supply chain professionals only enhance that fact. READ MORE
Knowing that price reduction and razor thin margins are top of mind for executives, an important question has emerged for today’s supply chains: at what point does a race for competitive prices become a race to the bottom? READ MORE
Buyer-seller relations can take on many forms, but it’s when they evolve into partnerships that they allow for the leanest supply chains and the highest profits. Such alliances, called channel partnerships, allow buyers and sellers to work together to find distributors and add the most value to their supply chain. READ MORE
Innovation in the supply chain is helping top companies around the world decrease lead times, minimize risk, cut costs and drive growth. To create this type of supply chain innovation in an era of rapidly changing markets, geographic shifts and expanding capabilities brought on by new technologies, successful businesses are increasingly turning to collaboration with other industry members – and sometimes even with competitors. READ MORE
Mitigating supply chain risk is a leading concern among global business leaders today and one that needs to be addressed on a larger scale. While 76 percent of business leaders consider operations risk management as important or very important to addressing supply chain risk issues, only 37 percent of non-leading companies make risk management a strategic imperative according to Accenture’s recent Global Operations Megatrends study. READ MORE
