Operations Rules News - Aggregated operations and supply chain news site

The market for supply chain management software (SCM), maintenance and services posted another year of solid growth, generating $8.944 billion in 2013, including applications for procurement software. That represented a nearly 7.4% increase over 2012 revenues, according to Chad Eschinger, vice president of supply chain with research firm Gartner.

A technology that has not been implemented widely in supply chain until recently is Machine Learning and combined with optimization it can produce breakthrough results. A recent award winning pricing project at Rue La La shows how this is done.

FM Global evaluated the relative risk – and resilience capacity to recover from disruptive events – of 130 countries. Their analysts developed risk index scores for each nation.

Quirky, is a startup that fields product ideas and selects some to produce. Recently, one in four Ideas is for Home products that can communicate with a smartphone or a household Wi-Fi network. These ideas are pursuing the much-promoted vision of the smart home, or the consumer Internet of things.The vision has been around for years, but the reality has remained elusive. To change this, Quirky is setting up a separate company, Wink, whose main technology is software intended to be the equivalent of an open operating system, helping to seamlessly connect all kinds of automated home devices.

Of the nearly 3,500 new consumer goods introduced in 2012, just 14 managed to generate at least $50 million in sales in their first year and sustain that momentum into their second, according to the market research group Nielsen.

There is a question that you need to ask your suppliers that will help both you and your supplier reduce risk and improve performance. The question is “What is the expected time to recovery if the site from which my part is supplied goes down?”

Cisco Systems Inc’s chief executive officer has written a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to curtail government surveillance after evidence circulated showing the National Security Agency had intercepted Cisco equipment, a company spokesman said on Sunday.

Starbucks must have become so successful recently that its supply chains are strained. It seems to be running out of things more than it used to. While the shortages may be a sign of solid expansion, they are also likely to alienate customers. Supply chain issues cut two ways.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has gone from being a topic best left to technology futurists to one that is about as common as corn flakes. Despite a lot of talk, there remains confusion about just how important this technology breakthrough will be for the supply chain.

After three decades of an exodus of production to China and other low-wage countries, companies have sharply curtailed moves abroad. Some have begun to return manufacturing to U.S. shores. Although no one keeps precise statistics, the retreat from offshoring is clear from various sources, including federal data on assistance to workers hurt by overseas moves. U.S. factory payrolls have grown for four straight years, with gains totaling about 650,000 jobs. That’s a small fraction of the 6 million lost in the previous decade, but it still marks the biggest and longest stretch of manufacturing increases in a quarter century.

With supply chain continuing to be a key source of competitive advantage and business growth, the worldwide supply chain management (SCM) and procurement software market grew 7.3 percent to US$8.9 billion in 2013. The market performed well as supply chain investments kept their priority status, even as IT budget decision makers remained cautious.

Forget the delivery drones and TV deals. Jeff Bezos’ stealthy foray into the unsexy world of B2B distribution is likely his most disruptive move yet — and it has an $8 trillion swath of the economy running scared.

Cook had made a particular point of tackling Apple’s monstrous inventory, which he considered fundamentally evil. He called himself the “Attila the Hun of inventory.”

The risk of disruption to corporate supply chains is running at near-record levels despite signs of improvement this year, according to an index created by the global trade body for purchasing managers.

“Developing applications for the ‘Internet of Things’ is far too complicated. In most cases, it requires very specialized (i.e. expensive) skills sets, in both hardware and software, to get even the most rudimentary prototypes up and running” Bugs Lab who released two apps to solve this problem.
Dweet is open-source software that allows any connected device to “tweet” its relevant information: location, sensor readings, photographs, etc. With just a simple tap in a web browser, you can connect your smartphone to the Internet of Things and access the information it’s publishing. (An additional tap takes it offline.) Freeboard draws from that data, or data from any other web-based source, and allows developers to put it to use in interactive user interfaces. If Dweet is Twitter, Freeboard is WordPress for the Internet of Things: In 10 minutes you’ve got your own interface up and running, importing device information from Dweet.

A new ranking of the competitiveness of the world’s top 25 exporting countries says the United States is once again a “rising star” of global manufacturing thanks to falling domestic natural gas prices, rising worker productivity and a lack of upward wage pressure.