Marisa Brown

Apqc Marisa Brown

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

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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.

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Workplace Mentoring is a Proven Practice in Supply Chain

Mentors can help send a powerful message to supply chain employees that whatever challenges they are facing, others have gone before them and have come out the other side successfully.

According to APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking data in supply chain planning, less than half of organizations support an omnichannel commerce strategy to a significant or very great extent.

Develop Supply Chain Maturity to Support Omnichannel Commerce Strategies

As organizations focus on supply chain responsiveness, omnichannel support is a key strategic concern.

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How to Improve First-Pass Quality Yield in Manufacturing

Achieving top-tier performance for finished-product first-pass quality yield for primary products takes careful planning, good supplier relationship management, well-documented processes and investments in the right technology.

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Robotic Process Automation for Procurement

RPA technology improves procurement efficiency for the organizations that invest in optimizing it.

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A Focus on Perfect Condition Rate Helps Drive Quality

There are plenty of steps a company can take to bring its perfect condition rate up, including collaborative work with suppliers, standardized packaging processes at warehouses and automation to reduce the opportunity for human error and track orders.

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Consider Environmental Factors in Sourcing Decisions

To survive and thrive, leading companies are thinking more broadly by considering strategic factors in sourcing decisions and continuing to invest in deeper supplier relationships.

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Metric of the Month: Reducing Warranty Costs as a Percentage of Sales

Through analyzing its Open Standards Benchmarking database, APQC found that bottom performers are at a massive disadvantage on this measure, with warranty costs five times higher than top performers.