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John Galt Solutions and enVista Join Forces to Drive Digital Supply Chain Transformation

supply chain envista

John Galt Solutions and enVista Join Forces to Drive Digital Supply Chain Transformation

John Galt Solutions, a global leader in supply chain planning, is proud to announce its strategic partnership with enVista, a prominent provider of supply chain and enterprise solutions. Together, these two industry leaders are set to expedite end-to-end digital transformations in supply chain planning, offering innovative technology, consulting, and implementation services across a wide array of industries.

In today’s hyper-dynamic business landscape, companies require heightened speed, agility, and responsiveness to effectively navigate challenges and capitalize on opportunities. By uniting enVista’s wealth of experience, spanning over two decades in implementing solutions for leading organizations, with John Galt Solutions’ industry-leading innovation through the Atlas Planning Platform, supply chain leaders now have a formidable combination to address their most intricate supply chain planning requirements.

Paul Baris, Vice President of Supply Chain Planning at enVista, emphasized the crucial role of a robust supply chain planning process powered by a top-tier platform like John Galt Solutions. He expressed excitement about collaborating to provide supply chain leaders with advanced planning tools necessary for achieving profitable operations.

Jason Brewer, Global Head of Partnerships and Alliances at John Galt Solutions, commented on the partnership’s significance, underlining their shared vision and commitment to excellence. The collaboration between enVista and John Galt Solutions aims to accelerate value for customers by offering an expanded set of solutions to tackle complex challenges while preparing for the future.

John Galt Solutions’ Atlas Planning Platform serves as the connective tissue for the entire supply chain, enabling leading companies to make smarter, faster, and more confident supply chain decisions. This highly intuitive and flexible SaaS platform empowers an intelligent, agile digital supply chain, expediting organizations’ transformation journeys across demand planning, inventory and supply planning, collaborative S&OP, production planning, and beyond. Companies globally, spanning various industries, rely on the Atlas Planning Platform to swiftly unlock unprecedented value and convert data across their extended enterprise network into actionable insights and operational strategies.

enVista, with its extensive supply chain consulting services, offers deep enterprise expertise and enabling technologies for mid-market and Fortune 500 organizations, with a focus on retail, distribution, manufacturing, consumer goods, third-party logistics (3PL), food and beverage, and more. enVista’s range of supply chain strategy services includes supply chain network design, omnichannel strategy, inventory management and optimization, direct-to-consumer strategy, sales and operations planning, product development and sourcing strategies, 3PL evaluation and selection, and transformation management.

It’s worth noting that enVista has been consistently recognized in the Market Guide for Supply Chain Strategy, Planning, and Operations Consulting by Gartner, Inc., a trusted source of actionable insights for executives and their teams. This marks the fifth consecutive year that enVista has earned a spot in this prestigious report.

retail

5 Key Retail Industry Trends for 2022

2021 was a year of adjustments in which the economy slowly recovered from the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic, a year that many believed would mean a return to normalcy, but the new Omicron variant rocked the world once again as a fresh reminder that, no, Covid has not gone away yet.

What do the next twelve months have in store for us? In 2022, we will continue to reshape the world with one thing in mind: to build our new reality… A direction that major retailers and brands were already beginning to move towards by reorganizing their channels and resources.

Looking to the future, Alfredo Pérez, International Business Development Manager at Tiendeo, explains the trends and tools that will be used by retail sector leaders and professionals, derived from his Hot Retail Trends 2022 study*.

1. Increased focus on e-commerce and digital channels

Changes in shopping habits have led to the digital channel becoming the preferred means of connecting with consumers. According to statistics, digital marketing (83%), social networks (73%) and e-commerce (63%) are positioned as the most relevant media for marketers in Latin America. The leading role that e-commerce is playing in the region is evident, 7 points higher than the international average.

In fact, in pursuit of ensuring greater traceability of campaigns, content personalization and automation strategies, retailers and brands have opted to implement the digital transformation of the consumer industry, encouraging constant interaction with the customer in both online and offline channels, resulting in 57% of marketers favoring digital channels while 41% lean towards offline channels.

2. Long live social shopping!

With 64% of the world’s population shopping via social media1, marketers are clear on where they are going to spend their advertising dollars. According to the Tiendeo study, 58% of retail executives will increase their advertising spend on social media in the next 12 months.

Although social shopping is a well-established trend in other parts of the world, this year the retail sector in Latin America will exploit the benefits of social shopping to the fullest. Accenture estimates that by 2025 the largest volume of sales in this channel will be in clothing (18%), electronics (13%) and home (7%).

3. Customer experience above all else

The main challenge facing retailers today is to identify the right time and channels to engage with both potential and repeat customers in order to offer them a seamless and frictionless shopping experience.

According to the Hot Retail Trends 2022 study, for 44% of marketing professionals, user experience is the most important aspect to consider in their strategy. Under this premise, retail is developing multi-touch strategies such as ROPO (Research Online and Purchase Offline) so that the consumer can have different alternatives and conversion points when shopping, whether on the web, e-commerce, or in the physical store.

4. More innovative stores

Digital mannequins that learn about your favorite items and guide you through the aisles, cashierless self-checkout stores, smart shelves that verify product availability or virtual try-on sessions, yes, these are the stores of the future.

Perez adds “With the incorporation of breakthrough technology (augmented reality, artificial intelligence, etc.) throughout the sales process, we will see increasingly autonomous stores that allow consumers to find what they are looking for almost instantly, receive the immediate attention they need, try it before buying it and also (why not) pay for it quickly, making a simple purchase a multi-sensory brand experience”. Retailers such as Walmart and Carrefour have already taken the plunge into this new way of interacting with customers in order to compete with the e-commerce giants.

5. Focus on the circular economy 

Customer concern for the environment has led retailers to reassess their strategies to be more environmentally conscious in order to find a balance between economic growth and sustainability.

In sustainable practices such as the Circular Economy where production cycles are closed to make the most of natural resources, the role played by digital tools is key. In 2021 many retailers began to implement more sustainable marketing actions with the digitization of the promotional catalog, long considered the key to generating brand awareness. This type of model favors the reduction of industrial waste by up to 80%.

Thus, industry professionals will step up their investment in digital advertising to communicate with customers, and this year digital channels will account for 86% of budget allocations, while offline media (outdoor advertising, catalogs, etc.) will account for 14%. 

*Study conducted in EMEA and LATAM based on the opinion of 358 directors and brand managers in the consumer sector in multiple categories (supermarkets, home, fashion, electronics, beauty, toys, DIY, pets, sports, health and travel) between November 8, 2021 and December 13, 2021.

digital value chain

Get More from Your Digital Value Chain

Business collaboration is all about uniting people, information, applications, and processes across an extended business network of consumers, partners, suppliers, distributors, and farmers, across all industries including agriculture, energy, metals, and mining. The idea is to break out of silos and connect to your partners in sourcing, supply, and procurement. Working as one is the new digital reality.

The challenge

Raw material and commodity businesses (from traders to supply chain to customers) across agriculture, energy, metals, and mining, need to communicate in real-time with their business partners to buy/sell, negotiate, manage supply chain operations and for financial settlements. There is a serious need to get more out of the digital value chain through automated workflows, custom dashboards, real-time chats with all counterparties, system integrations and analytics across the entire value chain, to solve business problems more efficiently.

Solutions that will help build digital value chains

-Partner onboarding: Digitalize and automate partner onboarding and reduce time spent on transactional processes.

-Contract management: Eliminate bottlenecks, improve efficiency and accountability by automating contract management workflows.

-Supply chain collaboration: Bring digitalization into your global value network and collaborate with your partners in the supply chain with superior visibility.

-Integration: A cloud-native solution designed to help you overcome collaboration silos and deliver a singular view of your business.

Connecting production, supply chain, and customers

Business collaboration ultimately means connecting to your network directly and unifying end-to-end processes. You can unify every step of the process by managing trading and risk, financial management, and digital supply chain with powerful enterprise applications that add a digital edge to enable faster decisions.

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Eka Software Solutions is a global leader in providing digital commodity management solutions, driven by cloud, blockchain, machine learning and analytics.

To talk to Eka experts please write to info@eka1.com

risk

Why COVID-19 is a Galvanizing Moment for Eliminating Physical and Digital Supply Chain Risk

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the resulting economic fallout was felt across borders and industries alike. From manufacturing to financial services, every industry has been scrambling to minimize the impact of the pandemic on the bottom line. For many businesses, this has helped serve as an urgent wake-up call to take proactive steps to identify and eliminate risk across their global supply chains, which typically span several tiers of suppliers dispersed across the world. Real-time supply chain risk visibility plays a critical role in avoiding business disruptions.

The Economic Risk

There is an immense economic risk that needs to be considered when a business operates a global supply chain. At the start of the pandemic, we witnessed the inevitable ripple effects across not just multiple industries but also across multiple different tiers of suppliers. For example, 3.74% of sub-tier suppliers in the Department of Defense’s ecosystem closed as a result of the pandemic. 75% of small businesses have reported that they have only enough cash in hand for 2 months or less. As suppliers struggle or go out of business, significant supply chain disruptions are common.

This instability coupled with the multitude of other economic crises facing the world, such as ongoing trade friction with China, could precipitate a fundamental collapse of global business as we know it. We must monitor our supply chains for more points of exposure to risks than ever before.

The Data Security Risk

With computer hacking having increased 330% since the start of the pandemic, global businesses also need to account for the cybersecurity risks involved with having a supply chain across multiple countries and potentially hundreds or thousands of suppliers. The data systems of global suppliers are a potential entry point to a brand’s or government agency’s data systems, presenting a major challenge across the global supply chain. Organizations must be able to assess and continuously monitor the strength of supplier data security measures and the changing cybersecurity-related risk associated with their suppliers.

Even after the pandemic subsides, the need for real-time risk monitoring in the extended digital supply chain will persist, especially as cybersecurity attacks grow in sophistication.

New Technology for Physical and Digital Supply Chain Risk Management

When it comes to monitoring risk associated with multiple tiers of suppliers, the majority of businesses are still way behind. According to Gartner, only 27% of companies perform ongoing third-party monitoring and only 2% directly monitor their 4th and 5th party suppliers. Although companies know they’re vulnerable to disruption by a sub-tier supplier, not enough are being directed or given the tools to actively monitor them effectively.

Historically, the majority of businesses attempt to identify, assess and manage supply chain risk manually and only periodically. This is because, previously, automation technology focused on making sense of large amounts of extended supply chain ecosystem data has not been up to the task. Much has changed. The global machine learning market was valued at just $1.58B in 2017 and is now expected to reach $20.83B in 2024, growing at a CAGR of 44.06%. New AI and machine learning-based technology is emerging rapidly and changing the game. This new technology can immediately illuminate risks across all tiers of a global supply chain because data on tens of millions of suppliers is continuously monitored from both a physical and digital supply chain perspective and across numerous risk factors.

Incorporating AI-powered solutions into your supply chain risk management strategy can automate the identification of risks that exist deep within a supply chain. In addition, adopting this technology ensures that an organization has continuous, real-time information to inform ongoing risk management efforts and identify problems before they threaten the business.

There is no way to know when the pandemic and its resulting implications will cease. Or when and where the next global event will happen. Looking ahead, successful businesses will be ready to continue functioning in a safe and secure way regardless of what issues they face. Supply chain-related blind spots and resulting disruptions can pose major complications for organizations that aren’t able to effectively identify and map risk. COVID-19 has driven a greater sense of urgency to shore up these problems. New technology for automated, continuous monitoring of supply chains end-to-end presents a new path toward operational resilience, business continuity, and overall health.

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Jennifer Bisceglie is the CEO of Interos, the first and only business relationship intelligence platform to protect enterprise ecosystems from financial, operations, governance, geographic, and cyber risk in every tier of enterprise supply chains, continuously.

Microsoft

Microsoft and C.H. Robinson Form Alliance for the Future of the Digital Supply Chain

As technology continues to adapt, so does the supply chain. These challenges require solutions rooted in innovative technology, further emphasizing the need for logistics and real-time data on a global scale. According to a recent report by McKinsey & Company, companies’ success will be driven by their ability to navigate the current volatile business environment, which means they must rely on an innovative and tech-driven supply chain. As we drive the future of technology in the industry, providing a continuous competitive advantage to our customers is vital.

That’s why we are excited about our alliance with Microsoft. To meet evolving supply chain demands, we are pioneering the supply chain of the future by joining forces with Microsoft – pairing the power of our industry-leading technologies C.H. Robinson’s Navisphere® and Microsoft Azure. This builds upon TMC, a division of C.H. Robinson’s successful implementation of Navisphere, its global multimodal transportation management system, across Microsoft’s global supply chain, giving Microsoft industry-leading reliability, efficiency, and real-time visibility to all inventory, at rest or in motion, anywhere in the world.

Partnering with other best-in-class companies and products brings value to our customers and carriers as we continuously look to enhance our technology built by and for supply chain experts. Through Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, we gain unlimited scalability, premier data security, and increased application speed, further demonstrating our commitment to technology-driven efficiencies and providing real results that impact the tech-forward supply chain for our customers and carriers.

Together, our technology helps address the changing demands of ever-evolving global supply chains. For example, as part of this collaboration, we are also integrating IoT device monitoring that measures temperature, shock, tilt, humidity, light, and pressure in shipments. This integration enables 100% real-time visibility to shipments as they move from the factory to distribution centers and ultimately to millions of customers.

We are always committed to creating efficiencies that provide unique solutions to the supply chain. Adapting in real-time to supply chain demands and providing our customers and carriers with innovative solutions, while harnessing the trajectory of technology, is key to staying ahead in the ever-evolving supply chain. Our alliance with Microsoft accomplishes exactly that.

As the pace of change in the industry remains at a pivotal moment, our unmatched commitment to tech-forward solutions and continued investment in technology to better serve customers remains a competitive advantage all of our customers can count on. Learn more and connect with an expert.

supply

Overcoming Obstacles in 2020 to Optimize the Digital Supply Chain

The logistics and supply chain market is transforming quickly. For the stakeholders involved, managing multiple partners, high customer expectations, siloed IT systems and dynamic conditions is a challenge. I recently shared my predictions for the supply chain and logistics industry and what global and domestic businesses can do to prepare for success in the new year. But, exactly how can businesses prepare for and confront some of the biggest barriers in 2020?

Transportation capacity constraints lead to inflated prices and significant waste.

In the supply chain, the saying “time is money” is particularly meaningful. Digital freight forwarder, Zencargo, analyzed more than 100 shipments from across the UK and found that more than 100 million hours are wasted per year in procurement, supplier management and freight-administration functions, for a total annual cost of nearly $2 billion.

With the state of capacity constraints, the transportation industry is a key contributor to the waste and inflated prices in logistics and supply chain processes. In the United States alone, 15 to 25 percent of trucks on the road are empty — and for non-empty miles, trailers are 36 percent underutilized. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) advises that capturing just half of this underutilized capacity would cut freight truck emissions by 100 million tons per year and reduce expenditures on diesel fuel by more than $30 billion a year. According to EDF, the movement of goods currently accounts for nine percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which is nearly 500 million metric tons annually in direct emissions.

On top of that, due to the fuel emissions produced by this sector it is responsible for an additional 100 million tons of climate pollution each year. Globally, trucks are the largest source of freight emissions (57 percent), and the emissions resulting from transportation vehicles and logistics operations contribute significantly to air pollution and unhealthy air quality.

With advanced technology-driven solutions, organizations have the ability to reduce waste and capacity constraints. By leveraging artificial intelligence and GPS devices to optimize shipping routes on an international, national and local scale, companies can decrease the distance and time involved in shipping products. In addition to optimizing planned routes, advanced analytics can also be utilized to take account of congestion and update routes in real-time. Through the use of technology, companies of all sizes can reduce carbon emissions and drive sustainability across the supply chain.

Looking ahead, I believe we will continue to see a concerted effort to reduce waste in the supply chain. We need to. The potential of an orchestrated, collaborative supply chain that addresses environmental and social challenges is profound. It is the responsibility of the industry to make the movement of goods sustainable. Across industries, leading with purpose, ethics and social responsibility is a model that resonates with businesses — including employees, partners, stakeholders, as well as with customers.

In fact, today’s consumers expect companies to meet a certain set of ethical standards to gain their buy-in. Companies that don’t address sustainability issues are at risk of losing business. Eliminating the empty miles and excess CO2 emissions will become a bigger focus for smaller companies as larger organizations use sustainability initiatives and ethical standards as criteria when selecting supply chain partners. Prepare for tomorrow, today by maximizing capacity and minimizing empty miles.

Increasing customer demands and faster delivery expectations

Due to rising customer demands and unprecedented expectations for product availability and expedited delivery, companies’ transportation spend is skyrocketing — and will continue to accelerate. Thanks to a culture of instant gratification, customers want what they want, where and when they want it — and that means they want it immediately. According to findings from Dropoff, 69 percent of consumers would not purchase from a retailer again if their delivery was late. Keeping up with the high customer demand brought on by events like Cyber Monday can be challenging for companies and especially exhausting resource-wise. However, this elevated pressure offers an opportunity to optimize and reduce costs.

In 2019, holiday retail sales grew 4.1 percent over the same period in 2018 to $730.2 billion, NRF reported. Online shopping sales during the winter holiday season increased 14.6% in 2019, accounting for $167.8 billion of the total. Given the high-demand of the holiday season, companies in 2020 should look to implement technologies, such as dynamic mapping, to ensure products are delivered efficiently and on-time to their final destinations.

With dynamic mapping, retailers can gain real-time visibility into their products, receiving exception alerts and recommendations, including dynamic predictive ETA. In addition, use of solutions like dynamic mapping provides real-time analysis, based on data from inside and outside their network, delivering the most accurate dynamic visibility available.

Digital Supply Chain 2020

In this increasingly complex industry, the supply chain will never be immune to disruptions — some things are simply unpredictable. But moving forward in 2020, one thing is certain: the ability to rapidly innovate and adapt will be vital for companies in the supply chain ecosystem. To effectively manage expectations and strategize for the year ahead, businesses should take a proactive approach to addressing any obstacles in their path and face challenges head on. Prioritizing sustainability as a strategic initiative is imperative for all businesses, across industries. Companies should equip themselves with the talent, tools and resources to navigate disruptions and deliver real results in 2020 and beyond.