As he recognized that the success of supply chain was increasingly dependent on system integration, data integrity, and other key aspects typically run by the IT department, he determined that tight integration between IT and supply chain was a must.
If you manufacture globally, it is simpler to be bound by the toughest regulatory system in your supply chain.
But Mr Lee and his colleagues are already concentrating on the ultimate prize of supply-chain integration: ways of constantly monitoring and improving the whole system by using all the available data.
Should investment be made in support of a new product direction, or in a digital inventory management system connected to the supply chain?
Giordano's management also took the opportunity to overhaul the company's inventory system, improving the operation's just-in-time supply chain.
It is a full supply-chain system and all the logistics that can go into it.
Carly Fiorina, HP's chief executive, blamed the unit's poor performance on the absence of a traditional uplift at the end of the quarter and disruption caused by a new supply chain system.
"It hit me like a bolt out of the blue, " he recalls: A franchise system would be a way to maintain standards and improve the supply chain.
If a retailer is big enough and powerful enough, it can often dictate that new technology be used along the supply chain to work seamlessly with its own cutting-edge POS system.
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Most important, Wal-Mart is exporting a retailing and supply-chain system that trains and influences not only the "associates" but the public as well.
As a business model, there is a lot of inefficiency built into the supply chain and replenishment process for these street vendors, since they reside a few notches down in the distribution system from the regular brick and mortar merchants with whom they compete.
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It is common for system companies to buy from local suppliers as it lowers the latency in the response of the supply chain.
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