Marisa Brown

Apqc Marisa Brown

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

Adobe Stock 461185230

3 Strategies to Spread Continuous Improvement Across Your Supply Chain

With a good story and numbers to back it up, you’ll have a much higher likelihood of sustaining or even expanding support for continuous improvement in supply chain.

Adobe Stock 213197551

Advice to Procurement Leaders: Focus on What You Can Control

While it is important to have these tactics in your playbook and prepare for external risks as much as possible, don’t overlook your ability to focus on what you can best control in procurement: the focus of your supplier relationships.

Adobe Stock 180795092 (1)

5 Things You Need to Know About Supply Chain Digital Transformation

Driven by goals like improving quality, boosting customer service, gaining real-time access to data and strengthening cyber security, organizations are maturing their approach to digital transformation at a dizzying speed.

Adobe Stock 293213406

Advanced Analytics in Today's Supply Chain

Building and coaching a team that is prepared to focus on big data and advanced analytics can offer an advantage as firms seek to compete on an ever-shifting supply chain playing field.

Speed Supply

The Need for Speed in the Face of Supply Disruptions

When an event disrupts your organization’s supply, how long does it take to identify your impacted materials, sites, commodities, and products? The answer to that question can impact your bottom line.

Adobe Stock 439523392

Top 6 Obstacles to Improving Supply Chain Processes

While internal collaboration accelerates expertise and helps build collaboration and communication skills within your team, external collaboration is critical for forging new paths in the face of supply chain uncertainty.

Adobe Stock 229585548

Outsourcing Customer Complaints and Inquires

Outsourcing or automating activities like order status updates can free up CSRs for activities that build stronger relationships and contribute to the bottom line.

Adobe Stock 338234490

Supply Chain Planning: Priorities and Strategies for 2024

Standardized processes help to enable technology and help organizations better prepare for disruption.

Adobe Stock 451876176

Packing Materials and Supply Chain Sustainability

Renewable packing materials—which are also compostable in many cases—have greater potential to drive sustainability by helping to reduce harmful waste.

Adobe Stock 175026854

Balance Efficiency and Risk in Logistics to Build Resilience

Organizations that care about their long-term survival and profitability need to assume that disruptions will inevitably occur and build supply chains that can flex and adapt in the face of these disruptions.

Adobe Stock 127146061

Developing a Contingency Playbook for Supply Chain Risks

By anticipating changes and disruptions and developing a contingency playbook, supply chain organizations can ensure their survival and competitive advantage in a world of ever-increasing risk and change.

Adobe Stock 607581412

Procurement in the Cloud

Whatever model you choose for procurement, it’s important to remain aware of the tradeoffs involved and to approach the cloud as part of a larger digital strategy for procurement and the enterprise more broadly.

Adobe Stock 453450209

Unlocking Innovation Through Supply Chain Benchmarking

Leading the charge to quantify the impacts of benchmarking to the organization and exposing a variety of employees to benchmarking practices can help increase buy-in and ensure continuity for these efforts.

Adobe Stock 275979900 (1)

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.

Adobe Stock 575701175 (1)

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.

Adobe Stock 581932339

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.

Adobe Stock 353771307 (1)

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.

Adobe Stock 200792738

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.

Adobe Stock 54356323

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.

Adobe Stock 280707002

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.

Adobe Stock 369174905

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.

Adobe Stock 330195850

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.

Funtap Adobe Stock 334004717

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.

Apqc Procure To Pay

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.