PeopleSoft worked its way up the ladder--always thrilling customers at each rung--and now sells mission-critical supply-chain software.
Managing and maintaining an optimal harmony among what goes as input to the supply chain, what is made and how much goes as waste is critical to responsible supply chain and to good product stewardship.
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Each benefits from the proliferation of mobile Internet on smartphones and tablets, playing a critical role in the chain.
But the mobile sector was already on a long march to using open source software in all the critical elements of the chain, from the OS up.
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Omega-3 is a long-chain fatty acid critical for brain structure and function.
Being able to play in this value chain will be critical to raising operator revenues in the future and it's fantastic to have a high-profile merchant like Skype on board.
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Demand chain management is increasingly critical.
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For example, Jim Rodgers, co-founder with George Soros of the Quantum Fund, told the BBC that a lack of farmers played a starring role in a recent spike in food prices - grain, corn and soybean being critical parts of the food supply chain.
In a span of less than 24 hours, our traveling band experienced critical elements of the shea supply chain, from the picking, packaging and tracking of shea nuts enabled through SAP mobile technology in Janga Town to the processing of the nuts into butter at Gumu Shea.
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The third mistake was that, because the workers were allowed to bypass the time-consuming mixing process in the tower, with its automatic controls for preventing such things happening, they were free to dump their material into a vessel that was not designed to prevent the accumulation of a critical mass sufficient to support a chain reaction.
After seeing the collection of the nuts in Janga Town the day before, we were now getting to witness the processing of the nuts into butter, the next critical step in global shea nut supply chain.
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The shape that the amino-acid chain wraps itself up into is critical to its function.
The CEO clearly is the most critical person in a company's leadership chain.
For a company like Apple (AAPL) that relies heavily on Japanese partners for critical components for its iPhone and iPad, the decision to keep its supply chain lean has painful implications when faced with the disruption caused the Japanese disaster.
Involving customers in the value chain, proactively seeking their input and treating them as part of the organization will be critical to improving products and services.
"We used to be about fishing and exporting to Scandinavia, now with the renewables we've got a reason for being again, so I think it's absolutely critical for us over the next few years, that we take that opportunity for the local supply chain, " said Dr Sewell.
Industrial producers and land planners should draw some lessons from the natural disasters of 2011 about where to site factories and supply chain partners as well as making plans to detect and rapidly recover from the risks of future shortages of critical products for our modern digital world.
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