In surely one of the first mergers of the year, GT Nexus and TradeCard are announcing their intent to merge their companies. GT Nexus provides a cloud-based global trade and logistics platform for manufacturers, retailers, and logistics service providers. TradeCard provides a cloud platform for managing sourcing, logistics, and finance on a single system. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone waits, as we go to press, to see how domestic political forces will impact the U.S. business climate right from the 2013 get-go. If ever “waiting with bated breath” was a relevant turn of phrase, it is probably now.

While both the near-term U.S. fiscal policies and the ongoing debt crisis in Europe will strongly influence the outlook for 2013, the further removed we are from the depths of the 2008 recession, the more companies want, and need, to shift from defensive to more offensive market-focused supply chain strategies. Read the rest of this entry »

I am very excited to be joining Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) as senior analyst, supply chain management.

TEC’s decision-support engine, robust feature/function models, and rich database of vendor capabilities enable TEC clients to realize faster time-to-value in software decisions.  Watching the evolution of how clients use software advisory firms, and, then, starting up my own analyst firm, has persuaded me more strongly than ever of the value of such an online capability for software evaluation. Read the rest of this entry »

It gives me great pleasure to announce that the 2012 Supply Chain Management Buyer’s Guide is here. Download your copy now.

In this buyer’s guide, I address a topic that deserves more discussion among supply chain strategists: collaboration. Read the rest of this entry »

TEC is coming up with four new buyer’s guides for 2012, and one slot is reserved for supply chain management (SCM) solutions. My main reason for pushing for this was that the global business landscape has been battered significantly by a slew of economic, political, social and environmental events over the past five years. This has resulted in significant losses for businesses around the world.

It is no secret that the world is going to engage in  a fairly trying period for the foreseeable future. And businesses will need to examine their outside environment more closely than ever before committing themselves to action. They will also need to take measures for obtaining greater visibility into and around their supply chain in order to adapt more quickly to changing circumstances.

TEC’s 2012 SCM Buyer’s Guide will discuss the issues that will continue to challenge supply chains, specifically in regard to managing complexity, achieving insight into the chain, and managing collaboration within the chain.

Here is a short synopsis of items I’ll be covering in the guide. Read the rest of this entry »

Globalization has lost its novelty. For most goods-driven enterprises it has become a matter of fact, just to stay in the game. However, the level of complexity that doing business globally entails can be daunting for professionals in charge of overseeing the supply chain—especially when the business needs to be nimble to keep ahead. Nimble can be painfully complex, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. That’s where global trade management (GTM) comes in. Read the rest of this entry »

Part II of this blog series allowed members of the two global trade management (GTM) software providers, TradeBeam and Precision Software, to voice their outlooks on the market (in light of the recent global trade decline). But at the end of the post I introduced the question of the possible threat to GTM providers coming from the large enterprise resource planning (ERP) providers.

Given that SAP, Infor and Oracle now have their own GTM offerings, and QAD has recently acquired Precision Software, what can GTM pure-players do against becoming a commoditized offering? In other words, what is it that the likes of Trade Beam, JP Morgan Chase Vastera, GT Nexus, Kewill, or Management Dynamics (and Precision Software if we look at its autonomous operations within QAD) do much better than ERP guys, so that ERP guys will not eat everyone’s lunch? Is it still about some functional features, or also about the service side (consulting and know-how)? Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog series analyzed the appropriateness of global sourcing and spend management applications for helping companies improve their cash flows and reduce working capital. It also introduced the question what might happen to global trade management (GTM) applications down the track.

Indeed, what about this credit crunch and recession, and how will that affect the global trade, imports from China, Letters of credit (L/Cs), etc.? With the current sad state of the banking world, many think that discussion about anything other than survival falls on deaf ears at the moment. We are in a bad state, and there is no trust in the system.

The initial sentiment is that corporations are not going to be investing in GTM and sourcing solutions in droves any time soon, other than to make sure they have liquidity to survive. Certainly, the exports/imports will be slower for a while, but does it necessarily follow that people do not need any help from GTM applications? In other words, are there any good GTM features that might even help folks be more effective in these trying times? Read the rest of this entry »

I have done blog posts lately on how some supply chain management (SCM) applications could fare in a down economy. One was about pricing optimization solutions while the other one was about how sourcing and procurement can help enterprises in a down economy. But in the meantime the global credit crunch has dawned with a vengeance.

This has not only promoted the economic downturn and recession into possible prospects of a depression, but has also recently had economics and/or political pundits ranting and raving all over the cable news, pro or contra the governments’ rescue (or bailout) measures (the two terms have been used depending on how someone views those state intervention measures). While I personally was not particularly in favor of rescuing via Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) those Wall Street crooks and inept misfits (and I’ve never been fond of the $20 martini drinks and $40 valet parking prices in New York City), it is difficult to neglect the other side that needs help.

Namely, it was appalling to watch the politicians’ inability to initially explain the true burning issue: the financial market’s unavailability of the short-term lines of credits that companies use regularly to make payroll, procure stuff, keep inventory, etc. Read the rest of this entry »