Supply Chain Management Blog

Culture and the Supply Chain

christianverstraete — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:10:00 GMT

In my previous post, I spoke about the tangibles and intangibles of Supply Chain Collaboration , but intentionally did not address one element, the cultural aspects of Supply Chain Collaboration. Companies have increased the outsourcing of their manufacturing...(read more)

The Tangibles and Intangibles of Supply Chain Collaboration

christianverstraete — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:38:00 GMT

The latest recession has gotten a profound impact on many supply chains and forced rethinking strategies . In a quest to reducing costs, many have diminished safety buffers, established lean thinking, and redesigned their flows. In that process they have...(read more)

Is Supply Chain Data safe in the Cloud?

christianverstraete — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:28:00 GMT

At the Gartner Symposium, last week, HP's CEO Mark Hurd was quoted about the lack of security in the Cloud . This is only one of the voices heard about cloud computing security. So, should we stop thinking about linking our partners in the cloud to...(read more)

CDP and Supply Chain Carbon Reporting

christianverstraete — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:09:00 GMT

Around this time of the year, many companies are looking for the by now famous CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) report. And the 2009 report is on-line. But that's not the only information available. For the first time CDP has also issued their first...(read more)

End-to-End Supply Chain and Metrics

christianverstraete — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:02:00 GMT

Last week, I was in Singapore at the SCM Logistics World 2009 . My presentation was around how to build a weatherproof Supply Chain through the increase of visibility across the ecosystem. Having talked about the subject previously on this blog, I'd...(read more)

It all starts with Design for the Environment

christianverstraete — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 09:26:00 GMT

Building greener products requires putting the environment right in the middle of the product design process. Indeed, that's where 80+% of the impact of the product on the environment are defined. Many companies seem to forget this. Design for the...(read more)

How did HP become a "Green" Company?

christianverstraete — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:37:00 GMT

On Monday, Newsweek released their inaugural Green Rankings , and interestingly, HP finished at the top. In an article, titled " The Greenest Big Companies in America " they explain they decided to publicize this list to recognize the efforts...(read more)

Could Community Clouds improve Supply Chain Collaboration?

christianverstraete — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:17:00 GMT

As President Obama announces a cloud computing initiative for the US , it is interesting to note that in their definition of Cloud Computing , the federal government includes an interesting deployment model, called community cloud. In their definition...(read more)

Don't forget the Cloud Supply Chain

christianverstraete — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:09:00 GMT

There are an increasing number of cloud based Supply Chain services, offered as SaaS, appearing on the market. But that is not the subject of this blog entry. Actually the question is way simpler. Are you aware of all the players participating in providing...(read more)

What application should we run in the cloud?

christianverstraete — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:30:00 GMT

A couple days ago, I received a call from a friend asking me a very simple question: "What criteria should I use to decide which applications I should move to the cloud?" Not having a direct answer myself, I searched the web, and to my amazement...(read more)

Merging Supply Chains, lessons learned

christianverstraete — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:23:00 GMT

A couple weeks ago I received the Quarter 2/2009 release of CSCMP's Supply Chain Quarterly, where I found a really interesting article titled: " When Supply Chains merge: 5 mistakes to avoid " by Harpal Singh. Reading the article, I was...(read more)

A Podcast on Cloud for Manufacturing

christianverstraete — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:40:00 GMT

A little over one month ago, Bernt Roessler, Mick Keyes and I spent some time with Dana Gardner from Interarbor Solutions and talked about Cloud Computing and how it could address specific needs of the Manufacturing Industry. If you wish, you can listen...(read more)

A Cloud ecosystem for Inter Enterprise Visibility

christianverstraete — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:03:00 GMT

As part of HP's latest press release on its partnership with GS1 Canada, HP is announcing the HP cloud computing ecosystem for manufacturing industries. This is a real exciting development. Let me explain why. In many entries of this blog, I have...(read more)

Collaboration, let's look beyond the tools

christianverstraete — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:10:00 GMT

Two weeks ago I was asked to run a workshop on collaboration at an event in China. Based on some of the ideas I shared in an earlier blog , I developed the content of the workshop. What daunted on me, listening to people in the audience, is that both...(read more)

Practical considerations for cloud computing

Ian Cole — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:20:00 GMT

There is currently a lot of attention being focused on Cloud Computing, but what does this mean in practical terms? HP's definition of Cloud Computing is in terms of globally available, scalable, and flexible services, which can be subscribed to on...(read more)