Autonomous car technology and the Self-Healing Supply Chain

JonathanLofton

autonomous car technology, self-healing supply chain, supply chain automationI recently rented a car featuring steering assist and intelligent cruise control. Now, I’m used to driver assist technologies as my vehicle has blind spot warning and front and rear collision warning, and braking. My wife’s car has a heads-up display as well as steering wheel vibration when you stray onto the lane lines, but when driving this rental, I felt the car was actually steering itself back into the lane when it drifted astray.

Since I wasn’t familiar with this feeling, I was compelled to try several different things to see how the car would respond. If I made the car move to the left side of the lane, would the automatic correction over-steer so that I would drift to the right? Designed as a “hands-on” driver assist system rather than a “self-driving” feature for use in both heavy and flowing traffic situations, the car did self-correct and did so continuously as I experimented with the feature.

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Influential management thinker Adam Grant revealed as Kinexions ’18 featured keynote

MikeMcAllister

Adam Grant

As the calendar turns to October, two things come immediately to mind. Pumpkin spice and Kinexions ’18. While we cannot unequivocally guarantee Kinexions ’18 will be a pumpkin spice free zone (after all, there are venues at the Gaylord Hotel at which one may procure hot, caffeinated, assumingly seasonally themed beverages), we can let you in on the identity of secret keynote speaker we’ve kept under wraps until now — Adam Grant.

You’ll likely recognize Adam.

After all, Adam’s TED talks on original thinkers and givers and takers have been viewed more than 12 million times, and he’s been recognized as one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers and in Fortune’s 40 under 40.

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Free trade agreements and the future of Canada’s Supply Management system

IlyasKucukcay

free trade agreement Canada, supply chain management Canada, impact of trade agreements, Canada supply chain management systemWe live in a world of globalization. The geographical and cultural limitations our predecessors had to struggle to access goods and services has virtually gone down to nothing. In a globalized world, international trade agreements that bring many economies together to benefit from each other are essential for survival. In the past, we’ve witnessed tremendous levels of effort by governments and communities to form strong alliances to grow their economies faster and provide the best available goods and services for their people.

Trilateral NAFTA (2.0) negotiations between Canada, Mexico and the USA – which culminated in this week’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) – is a perfect case study showing the long-term impact of trade agreements. Years of regulated collaboration between the three North American countries not only helped grow the respective economies faster compared to the rest of the world but also helped all North Americans build mutual trust and commitment.

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Building the foundation of your digital supply chain

AlexaCheater

Webinar | Building the foundation of your digital supply chainIt’s getting harder and harder to get ahead—and stay ahead—of the constantly shifting realities of today’s interconnected world. Unstable markets, growing customer demands, emerging competition and deep-rooted reliance on outdated, legacy systems are causing chaos and complexity.

Traditional supply chain issues are only getting compounded by all of these new and emerging data sources. Everyone’s turning to digital for the answers. And it’s no wonder when companies with digital supply chains are seeing enterprise-wide results like 25% faster response times, 30% working capital reductions and up to 110% higher operating margins.

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Kinaxis once again positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Supply Chain Planning System of Record

MikeMcAllister

It’s important to be recognized, in life, and in business.

Gartner Magic Quadrant SCP SOR

That’s why we’re particularly excited to share the news of Gartner’s most recent research, the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Supply Chain Planning System of Record. In it, Gartner positions Kinaxis as a Leader for the third consecutive time, providing what we think is some pretty weighty validation for our vision of what a supply chain planning platform should be.

Gartner defines an SCP SOR as a planning platform that “enables a company to create, visualize, manage, link, align, collaborate and share its planning data across a supply chain. The platform encompasses demand plan creation, the supply-side response, and detailed operational and tactical-level planning.”1

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Gamification ideas in business: Your way to a more efficient supply chain

EmilyHunt

Gamification ideas in business: Your way to a more efficient supply chainSimply put, gamification involves the application of game design elements in a business setting. Gamification uses both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators to encourage users to perform at their best, fostering engagement through tactics ranging from simple – such as a progress bar, to those that are more complex – such as loyalty programs and immersive storytelling.

When gamification in business is deployed to the right audience and provides the right motivation, significant engagement follows. Take for example Volkswagen’s 2011 “People’s Car Project” in China for which the aim was to inspire the imagination of its followers by allowing them to design their own cars. Because of this project, vw.com gained 33 million hits and generated 119,000 ideas.

Which is great. But how could gamification be applied to a supply chain?

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Transitioning to Digital Supply Networks

MikeMcAllister

supply networksBy APICS CEO Abe Eshkenazi, CSCP, CPA, CAE

This article was originally published on apics.org, and is republished with permission.

With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, supply chain professionals are expected to embrace many new technologies – from artificial intelligence and robotics to predictive analytics and cloud computing. To best integrate these technologies and share information among buyers, suppliers and partners, supply chain professionals also need to reshape their supply chains into digital supply networks (DSNs). New insights from Deloitte reveal that, although companies are aware of this necessary shift, not all of them are ready for it.

According to article authors Stephen Laaper, Glenn Yauch, Paul Wellener and Ryan Robinson, a DSN enables the integration of data from various sources to better inform production and distribution. A traditional supply chain often is visualized as a rigid, linear arrangement of supply chain partners that handle the different primary management processes of plan, source, make, deliver, return and enable. Each member of the traditional supply chain might share data with one other member, but that’s the extent of the integration. A DSN, the authors explain, has a flexible, matrix-like structure that allows the different players and processes of a supply chain to all share data with each other.

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Indiana Jones and the supply chain bullwhip effect

JoeCannata

Indiana Jones and the supply chain bullwhip effectAccording to the European Journal of Operational Research, the term ‘bullwhip effect’ was first coined by Procter & Gamble (P&G) in the 1990s in reference to the order variance amplification phenomenon observed between P&G and its suppliers.”

A small shift in customer demand essentially cracks the whip, and the further a supplier is from the demand, the more significant the impact, which inevitably leads to increasing swings in inventory for suppliers.

This question of demand management led me to wonder if any bullwhip manufacturer or supplier ever ran into a situation that caused them to experience the bullwhip effect in their own supply chains.

How ironic would that be?

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