Marisa Brown

Apqc Marisa Brown

Marisa Brown is senior principal research lead for supply chain management for APQC.

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Procurement is Changing for the Better

While procurement has an important responsibility to be a good steward of an organization’s financial resources, a greater focus on resiliency and continuity of supply is vital.

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Supply Chains Embrace Digital Transformation Into the Future

The need for improved collaboration and decision-making is driving much of this innovation as leaders seek to get actionable insights faster, from ever-increasing quantities of data.

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Optimizing Last Mile Deliveries in a B2B Context

B2B organizations that are able to follow these same practices will be more likely to meet rising customer expectations and enjoy greater competitive advantage as a result.

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Assessing the Current State of Advanced Supply Chain Analytics

Organizations that continue to dither about whether analytics is a good investment and those that struggle with change management will increasingly be left behind.

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Sales and Operations Planning, Integrated Business Planning: The Current State

Driving the type of culture where these processes can make the most impact requires support from the top and incentives to break down silos, roll up sleeves, and undertake the difficult but ultimately value-driving work of collaboration.

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Clarity Through Consequences for Service Level Agreements

Ideally, SLAs should include rewards and incentives for meeting expectations, but even more importantly, they should clearly specify the consequences that the supplier will face if the terms of the SLA are not met.

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Screening Logistics Providers for Sustainability

Organizations that do not currently track and assess the sustainability of their logistics providers may be left scrambling when Scope 3 disclosure requirements are no longer optional but instead become mandatory.

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Investing in the Development of Your Logistics Employees

APQC research on employee retention found that the pursuit of better career development opportunities is the most common reason why employees seek work elsewhere. Providing opportunities for your logistics employees is now paramount.

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Aligning Customer Service with Leadership Priorities

One of the most effective ways to ensure that KPIs align with strategic priorities from leaders is to ask them directly. These responses are helpful for getting a sense of broader goals for your customer service team.

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Robotic Process Automations Needs the Right Foundations for Success in Supply Chain

Effective governance structures, roles and deployment approaches all help to ensure that RPA projects are carried out in a systematic way.

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Procure-to-Pay Suffers from Disconnected Governance

To focus on productively managing the end-to-end process, organizations need to shift from thinking of procurement and AP as separate processes and implement governance that enables them to become an integrated, seamless end-to-end process.

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Address Internal Resistance to Open Innovation

In times of disruption, open innovation can help organizations to find new ways of working that make the business more resilient and responsive to customers or to develop new products and services that are feasible within existing constraints.

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Order Visibility as a Key Part of the Order-to-Cash Process

Today’s customers expect the same visibility and transparency in their business-to-business (B2B) transactions as they experience in their personal transactions.

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Adopt Planning Capabilities That Enable Scenario Modeling and Analysis

Whether supply chain leaders are trying to figure out the optimal supplier network, where to locate inventory, or how customer demand patterns will be affected by a new product launch, they need more than a simple review of historical data.

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Extend Visibility Beyond Tier 1 Suppliers

Thanks to advances in technology, gaining information on supplier performance and potential disruptions is no longer such a time-intensive task.

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Weighing the Impact of Supply Chain Disruptions

Supply chain pros can see through the clickbait and understand the deeper reasons for supply chain disruptions, but what about consumers?

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Top 6 Obstacles to Improving Supply Chain Processes In 2022

APQC’s 2022 Supply Chain Priorities and Challenges research with supply chain professionals found that many of the biggest barriers to process improvement in supply chain come from a lack of these skills.

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Benchmarking the Actual vs. Maximum Production Rate

APQC has found that 29 percent of organizations have already significantly invested in manufacturing systems that can configure and monitor on their own, giving those organizations an improved ability to maximize their actual production rate.

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6 Skills for AI-Ready Supply Chain Professionals

Here are six new skills that supply chain employees need to develop or enhance as the result of AI adoption.

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Continuous Global Risk Monitoring for Supply Chain Disruptions

Organizations that lack these systems completely will only be able to react to disruptions once they have occurred, and even those with systems that provide basic monitoring (but no information on impact) may lose valuable response time.

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3 Practices for Better Category Management

Mature category management can lead to improved negotiation capabilities because it provides greater visibility into spend across suppliers.

Note: The total does not equal 100% due to rounding. The percentages represent median values.

Supplier Management Needs More Time and Attention

In the face of disruption—whether from a global pandemic, raw materials shortages, congested ports or something else—your supplier’s success or failure can determine your own.

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Leverage Package Tracking to Improve Logistics Performance

The most common package tracking method is currently RFID, followed by IoT sensors; few organizations are currently using blockchain for package tracking.

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Think Holistically for More Cost-Effective Warehousing

To lower costs in a sustainable and impactful way, you’ll want to develop a multi-pronged solution that addresses people, process, technology and the physical environment of the warehouse.