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6 Important KPIs to Monitor in a Shared Supply Management Context

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6 Important KPIs to Monitor in a Shared Supply Management Context

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Making the right product available at the right time is a challenge industrial companies are faced with daily. To optimize their Supply Management, many are choosing Vendor Management Inventory, a system based on collaboration between client and vendor. To ensure your VMI project is successful, however, some KPIs must be monitored attentively. Generix Group has compiled everything you need to know on the subject in an infographic.

The challenges of Shared Supply Management

Implementing a VMI lets customers and vendors collectively manage their product workflows. Using this collaborative model, they can optimize Supply Management by geolocating stocks and measuring their levels according to real-time consumption data provided by sales locations. This leads to improved customer service, reduced overstocking, better cost management, and increased sales.

The Shared Supply Management process has proven itself to be an undeniable advantage, particularly when dealing with FMCG players. Powerful collaborative solutions have also proven to be a growth driver and can set a company apart from the competition.

To learn more about this topic: [Product Sheet] The Benefits of Shared Supply Management 

Six key VMI KPIs

Generix Group experts have defined six important KPIs to measure, from consumption predictions to stockout rates.

Whether you’re looking to improve needs evaluation to take advantage of forecasting trends and turnover rates, or directing future actions to limit surcharges, VMIs offer a wide array of key information and advantages, as shown in the infographic below.

Implementing a VMI offers a number of competitive advantages, provided that users know how to take full advantage of their solution. To do so, they must carefully monitor the right indicators. Generix Group has compiled a list in the six-point infographic below. Are you new to the collaborative adventure? Or perhaps you are looking for a way to guard against the risk of error. Generix Group is here to help!

This article originally appeared on GenerixGroup.com. Republished with permission.

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OKRs Help Companies Navigate the New Normal

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The onset of COVID-19 presented an unprecedented challenging situation – for the first time, perhaps in history, there was a universal experience shared by workers around the world. A near-collective shift took place, uprooting offices and transplanting employees to their homes. Remote work is no longer a perk that companies offer their teams, but rather a necessity.

This created and still creates, a unique challenge for many companies. Offices were considered vital to the basic operations of a company—a place where workers could convene and coordinate projects on a daily basis, retrieving answers to questions with a simple walk to a colleague’s desk. With this possibility wiped away, companies needed to adjust, and fast.

Fortunately, many have been able to transition to a digital office space with increasing utilization of online team platforms and video conferencing making it possible for companies to continue working in most industries. It’s now called the “new normal” and, globally, employees have adjusted.

Now comes a time when companies can’t simply tread water and grow complacent with this new sense of normalcy. They have to forge ahead, and progress now involves many business leaders declaring that their post-COVID-19 organizations will be completely redesigned to take advantage of all work-from-home possibilities – a trend confirmed in a recent Gartner survey of over 317 CFOs.

Historically, we know that businesses find ways to live on. Moments of economic uncertainty generate opportunities for companies to dream bigger, to set stretch goals and direct their teams toward the future with exact focus. To achieve this, it’s important that corporate objectives and the bigger picture aren’t lost in the day-to-day activities of a company.

OKRs, a goal-setting methodology that was developed by Intel’s Andy Grove, are widely used by industry-leading companies such as Google, LinkedIn, Uber, Twitter and many more. OKRs are becoming the golden standard of goal management. The structure is simple and unbelievably effective.

OKRs are comprised of objectives – meaning qualitative, inspirational, time-bound goals that direct a team, and key results – or quantitative deliverables that are used to measure the success of the objective.

To give an example, a solid objective would be “Increase User Base.” The corresponding key results that could be used to measure this objective are:

“Increase number of paid users from 4k to 10K”

“Increase outbound leads/month from 20 to 40”

Companies that choose to utilize the OKR methodology see a myriad of benefits. Five key benefits are outlined by John Doerr, another Intel alum who popularized the OKR framework. These benefits include focus, alignment, commitment, tracking and stretching.

In the context of the COVID-19 world and the new normal, these benefits become even more apparent. The OKR methodology doesn’t just organize companies, it forces them to adopt a pattern of goal prioritization and evaluation that becomes ingrained in company culture, turning abstract aspirations into concrete results.

On a corporate level, OKRs help leaders focus their hopes for the company and direct their collective efforts in the direction they want to grow. Furthermore, they provide transparency within a company, communicating the big picture that might otherwise have been a mystery to individual employees on the lowest rung of the ladder.

At an individual level, OKRs present even more benefits. No man is an island, and yet, when working from home, every employee is physically isolated and virtual communication might not be enough to make individuals feel connected to the purpose of the company. With OKRs, individuals can gain a sense of purpose and contribution, even while remote.

OKRs ask employees to take ownership of their goals, empowering employees with autonomy. Moreover, they can be aligned between company levels, either through top-down alignment, where corporate-level key results inform departmental objectives in a cascading manner, or bottom-up alignment, where team-level objectives inform departmental key results. This alignment is an integral part of the structure of OKRs and keeps a company on track.

OKR alignment doesn’t require in-person meetings or an office space to occur. It simply needs communication and foresight on the part of individuals within an organization. Employees, then, aren’t isolated and completing day-to-day tasks with no sense of purpose or larger overarching goals. When tracking OKRs, they can see how their work contributes to the organization, creating connectivity and engagement.

Another reason that OKRs are helping companies navigate business in the new normal is because the mindset of employee productivity is shifting to measuring results rather than activities. This is going to be a fundamental change post-COVID-19, as it will bring in a culture of transparency with a scoreboard being available for everyone.

Today, instead of measuring an employee’s workday by eight hours in the office, it’s measured by results and impact, rather than individual activities. This adjusted perspective on employee productivity lends itself well to the OKR methodology. In addition to looking at their results, employees are also going to look at their contribution to team, departmental and corporate goals, and will be able to see how they helped move the needle with trackable OKRs.

Navigating the new normal has presented companies with an unprecedented challenge, and in response, the OKR methodology offers up a solution that provides teams—no matter how physically distant they may be—with focus, alignment and engagement.

_________________________________________________________________

Bastin Gerald is the CEO and founder of Profit.co, an intuitive cloud-based SaaS platform, integrating OKRs and task management plus 300 other data-driven metrics to help companies successfully implement the model and reach new heights. Profit.co helps companies focus, align and engage teams for optimal productivity and company success. To learn more, visit https://www.profit.co/.

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Archives, Global Trade Daily, Software

5 Strategies to Reduce Cloud Cost

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After initial migration to the cloud, companies often discover that their infrastructure costs are surprisingly high. No matter how good the initial planning and cost estimation process was, the final costs almost always come in above expectations.

On-demand provisioning of cloud resources can be used to save money, but initially, it contributes to increased infrastructure usage due to the ease and speed at which the resources can be provisioned. But companies shouldn’t be discouraged by that. And infrastructure teams shouldn’t use it as a reason to tighten security policies or take flexibility back from the engineering teams. There are ways to achieve both high flexibility and low cost but it requires experience, the right tooling, and small changes to the development process and company culture.

In this article, we present five strategies that we use to help companies reduce their cloud costs and effectively plan for cloud migration.

Lightweight CICD

In one of our recent articles we discussed how companies can migrate to microservices but often forget to refactor the release process. The monolithic release process can lead to bloated integration environments. Unfortunately, after being starved for test environments in the data center, teams often overcompensate when migrating to the cloud by provisioning too many environments. The ease with which it can be done in the cloud makes the situation even worse.

Unfortunately, a high number of non-production environments don’t even help with increasing speed to market. Instead, it can lead to a longer and more brittle release process, even if all parts of the process are automated.

If you notice that your non-production infrastructure costs are getting high, you may be able to reduce your total cloud costs by implementing a lightweight continuous delivery process. To implement it, the key changes would include:

-Shifting testing to the level of individual microservices or applications in isolation. If designed right, the majority of defects can be found at the service-level testing. Proper implementation of stubs and test data would ensure high test coverage.

-Reducing the number of integration testing environments, including functional integration, performance integration, user acceptance, and staging.

-Embracing service mesh and smart routing between applications and microservices. The service mesh can allow multiple logical “environments” to safely exist within the perimeter of production environments and allows testing of services in the “dark launch” mode directly in production.

-Onboarding modern continuous delivery tooling such as Harness.io to streamline the CICD pipeline, implement safe dark launches in the production environment, and enable controlled and monitored canary releases.

See our previous article that goes into more detail on the subject.

Application modernization: containers, serverless, and cloud-native stack

The lift and shift strategy of cloud migration is becoming less and less popular but only a few companies choose to do deep application modernization and migrate their workloads to containers or serverless computing. Deploying applications directly on VMs is a viable approach, which can align with immutable infrastructure, infrastructure-as-code, and lightweight CICD requirements. For some applications, including many stateful components, it is the only reliable choice. However, VM-based deployment brings infrastructure overheads.

Resource (memory, CPU) overhead of container clusters may be less for 30% or more due to denser packing, larger machines and asynchronous workload scavenging unused capacity.

Containers improve resource (memory, CPU) utilization for approximately 30% compared to VM-based workloads because of denser packing and larger machines. Asynchronous jobs further improve efficiency by scavenging unused capacity.

The good news is that container platforms have matured significantly over the last few years. Most cloud providers support Kubernetes as a service with Amazon EKS, Google GKE, and Azure AKS. With only rare exceptions of sine packaged legacy applications or non-standard technology stacks, the Kubernetes-based platform can support most application workloads and satisfy enterprise requirements.

Whether to host stateful components such as databases, caches, and message queues in containers is still open for choice but even migrating stateless applications will reduce infrastructure costs. In case stateful components are not hosted in container platforms, cloud services such as Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis, Google Cloud SQL, Google Spanner, Google Pub/Sub, Azure SQL, Azure CosmosDB, and many others can be used. We have recently published an article comparing a subset of cloud databases and EDWs.

More advanced modernization can include migration to serverless deployments with Amazon Lambdas, Google Cloud Functions, or Azure Functions. Modern cloud container runtimes like Google Cloud Run or AWS Fargate offer a middle ground between opinionated serverless platforms and regular Kubernetes infrastructure. Depending on the use case, they can also contribute to infrastructure cost savings. As an added benefit, usage of cloud services reduces human costs associated with provisioning, configuration, and maintenance.

Reactive and proactive scalability

There are two types of scalability that companies can implement to improve the utilization of cloud resources and reduce cloud costs: reactive auto-scaling and predictive AI-based scaling. Reactive autoscaling is the easiest to implement, but only works for stateless applications that don’t require long start-up and warm-up times. Since it is based on run-time metrics, it doesn’t handle well sudden bursts of traffic. In this case, either too many instances can be provisioned when they are not needed, or new instances can be provisioned too late, and customers will experience degraded performance. Applications that are configured for auto-scaling should be designed and implemented to start and warm up quickly.

Predictive scaling works for all types of applications including databases, other stateful components, and applications that take a long time to boot and warm up. Predictive scaling relies on AI and machine learning that analyzes past traffic, performance, and utilization and provides predictions on the required infrastructure footprint to handle upcoming surges or slow downs in traffic.

In our past implementations, we found that most applications have well-defined daily, weekly, and annual usage patterns. It applies to both customer-facing and internal applications but works best for customer applications due to natural fluctuations in how customers engage with companies. In more advanced cases, internal promotions and sales data can be used to predict future demand and traffic patterns.

A word of caution should be added about scalability, regarding both auto-scaling and predictive scaling. Most cloud providers provide discounts for stable continuous usage of CPU capacity or other cloud resources. If scalability can’t provide better savings than cloud discounts, it doesn’t have to be implemented.

On-demand and low-priority workloads

To take advantage of both dynamic scalability and cloud discounts for continued usage of resources, a company can implement on-demand provisioning of low-priority workloads. Such workloads can include in-depth testing, batch analytics, reporting, etc. For example, even with lightweight CICD, a company would still need to perform service-level testing or integration testing, in test or production environments. The CICD process can be designed in such a way that heavy testing will be aligned with the low production traffic. For customer-facing applications, it would often correspond to the night time. Most cloud providers allow discounts for continued usage even when a VM is taken down and then reprovisioned with a different workload, so a company would not need to sacrifice flexibility in deployments and reusing existing provisioning and deployment automation.

The important aspect of on-demand provisioning of environments is to destroy them as soon as they are not needed. Our experience shows that engineers often forget to shut down environments when they don’t need them. To avoid reliance on people, we implement shutdown either as a part of a continuous delivery pipeline and implement an environment leasing system. In the latter case, each newly created on-demand environment will get a lease and if an owner doesn’t explicitly renew the lease it will get destroyed when the lease expires. Separate monitoring processes and garbage collection of cloud resources are also often needed to ensure that every unused resource will get destroyed.

An additional cost-saving measure that we effectively used in several client implementations is usage of deeply discounted cloud resources that are provided with limited SLA guarantees. Examples of such resources are spot (AWS) or preemptible (GCP) VM instances. They represent unused capacity that are a few times cheaper than regular VM instances. Such instances can be used for build-test automation and various batch jobs that are not sensitive to restarts.

Monitoring 360

The famous maxim that you can’t manage what you can’t measure applies to cloud costs as well. When it comes to monitoring of cloud infrastructure, an obvious choice is to use cloud tools. To make the most out of cost monitoring, cloud resources have to be organized in the right way to be able to measure costs by:

-Department

-Team

-Application or microservice

-Environment

-Change

While the first points might be obvious, the last one might require additional clarification. In modern continuous delivery implementations, nearly every commit to source code repository triggers continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline, which in turn provisions cloud infrastructure for test environments. This means that every change has an associated infrastructure cost, which should be measured and optimized. We have written more extensively about measuring change-level metrics and KPIs in the Continuous Delivery Blueprint book.

Multiple techniques exist to properly measure cloud infrastructure costs:

-Organizing cloud projects by departments, teams, or applications, and associating the cost and billing of such projects with department or team budgets.

-Tagging cloud resources with department, team, application, environment, or change tags.

-Using tools, including cloud cost analysis and optimization tools, or tools such as Harness.io, which provides continuous efficiency features to measure, report, and optimize infrastructure costs.

With the proper cost monitoring and the right tooling, the company should be able to get a proper understanding of inefficiencies and apply one of the cost optimization techniques we have outlined above.

Conclusion

Cloud migration is a challenging endeavor for any organization. While it’s important to estimate cloud infrastructure costs in advance, the companies shouldn’t be discouraged when they start getting higher invoices than originally expected. The first priority should be to get the applications running and avoid disruption to the business. The company can then use the strategies outlined above to optimize the cloud infrastructure footprint and reduce cloud costs. Grid Dynamics has helped numerous Fortune-1000 companies optimize cloud costs during and after the initial phases of cloud migration. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or if you need help optimizing your cloud infrastructure footprint.

Archives, Global Logistics, Global Trade Daily, Software

Reinforcing Your Technology Infrastructure to Handle the Unexpected in the New Normal

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The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted virtually every area of our personal and professional lives. The virus has changed everything from the way we shop for groceries to the methods used to perform our jobs. In some sectors like the restaurant and retail industries, the immediate effects on businesses and the workforce have been devastating. If these establishments can continue to operate, many new restrictions and practices need to be adopted to keep both employees and customers safe.

Many businesses that do not rely on face-to-face contact with their customers were able to rapidly shift and continue operations by instituting remote work. These companies have not been negatively impacted to the same degree. This is not to say that there haven’t been substantial challenges to implementing and supporting a remote workforce. In many cases, flourishing corporate cultures were upended overnight by travel restrictions and social distancing guidelines put in place by local governments.

As the initial panic over COVID-19 settles down, businesses are faced with navigating a new normal if they hope to survive. From the look of the current global landscape, it appears like this new normal is here to stay and that we are not likely ever fully return to a pre-pandemic mindset. There is a strong possibility that the new normal will just morph into the regular normal leap-frogging the way things were in the past into a future full of virtual collaboration, global cloud platform enabling business processes and expecting the unexpected.

Winning Technology Enablement Strategies for the New Normal Virtual Organization

We were well on our way to virtual organizations before the pandemic; however, COVID-19 certainly accelerated us further down this path. There are tremendous technology options available to assist companies that have transitioned to a nearly 100% virtual organization. Major business application cloud platforms such as MS Dynamics, Salesforce and ServiceNow enable global collaboration and business process enablement.

Analytics platforms such as Azure and AWS provide robust solutions that enable improved visibility and better decision-making. Collaboration suites like MS O365 and Google’s G-suite allow global teams to operate effectively. However, these platforms all have very different capabilities and require a robust implementation and support plan. Selecting the right platform that is the best fit for your needs and proceeding with a robust implementation and support plan can make a huge difference in the business outcomes. At the very least, using the wrong solution will require retooling at some point to address a lack of features or provide enhanced functionality. This type of change can adversely affect productivity, as everyone needs to become familiar with new tools and processes.

Three characteristics are critically important when implementing technology solutions in the business world. Ensuring that these criteria are met will go a long way toward allowing a business to compete during a pandemic or economic downturn and handle the uncertain times that lie ahead. These characteristics are essential in providing the tools for a remote workforce and will continue to demonstrate their value as the future unfolds.

1.  Flexibility and Scalability

Solutions that are adopted to meet the challenges brought about by the pandemic should be flexible enough to handle the current circumstances, as well as any permanent changes in the way business will be conducted. They also need to be highly scalable, in order to scale up and down efficiently to handle the possibility that offices may reopen and then be forced to close again in favor of remote work. Employees should be able to use the same set of tools to get their jobs done whether working from their cubicle or a home office. As business needs evolve, so too should the toolset used to meet new requirements.

2.  Reliability

Technology solutions are always important. This importance is heightened by the difficulties of supporting a remote workforce. Unreliable tools will hinder productivity and hurt morale as businesses and employees struggle with negotiating the challenges of the new normal. The beleaguered IT departments of small businesses will be hard-pressed to address the problems of applications that fail to provide the promised functionality to a workforce spread out over multiple locations.

3. Security

Security needs to be the top priority in any technology solutions that are introduced to enable a remote workforce. There are the normal concerns associated with having data resources available remotely. These include the increased potential for misuse of sensitive data and providing new and possibly unsecured access to enterprise IT systems.

An additional security risk is that hackers are actively using COVID-19 as a lure for phishing campaigns designed to gain entry into corporate systems by preying on the reduced defenses of remote workers. A breached network can lead to ransomware or other forms of malware that can cripple a business.

Evaluating Technological Solutions and Choosing the Right IT Partner for Your Business

While some companies were well-prepared for the shift to the new virtual organization, many had to scramble and implement ad-hoc solutions to keep their businesses running. In many cases, this resulted in less than optimal security and choosing software tools that may be inadequate for long-term enterprise usage. Stop-gap measures and decisions that needed to be made quickly may now need to be reevaluated and modified. Since it seems as if COVID-19 and its impact on society will be with us for the foreseeable future, now is the time to conduct this evaluation.

Public cloud providers offer numerous solutions that furnish the security, flexibility, and reliability needed to successfully negotiate the challenges of operating a business in these challenging times. Their expertise can help augment a company’s IT resources or provide them to organizations that lack technical skills. Making wise use of cloud computing services enables an enterprise to be ready for whatever the future holds. As the corporate world attempts to cope with COVID-19, taking advantage of cloud computing offers a promising strategy.

While these enabling are robust solutions, it’s not just about the product you select, but also the implementation methodology you follow. For example, Salesforce and MS CRM are both great CRMs, one which may be a better fit for certain types of businesses than the other.  However, the most important key to success is choosing an implementation partner that has a robust methodology that will enable the changes you seek. Most failure happens due to a poor implementation process, not because an organization chose the wrong product.

_____________________________________________________________

Tim Britt is the CEO and co-founder of Synoptek, a global consulting and IT services firm focused on delivering results for its customers. Britt has served as a strategic executive in the capacity of CEO and CIO for the past 25 years. He has provided strategic consulting both in his current role at Synoptek and with dozens of prior strategy and operational consulting firms serving Disney, Levi Strauss, Home Depot, Jusco, and others. 

Britt holds an industrial engineering degree from Georgia Institute of Technology and an MBA from J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University. He lives in Irvine, California with his wife and four children, and enjoys skiing, hiking, biking, running, fishing, and other outdoor activities as well as dedicating himself to philanthropic interests in the areas of conservation and education.

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Air Cargo, Archives, Global Logistics, Global Trade Daily

THAT BUZZING IS THE SOUND OF FREEDOM: THANK THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY FOR THE RISE OF DRONES IN LOGISTICS AND TRANSPORTATION

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The demand within the global drone logistics and transportation industry is rising at a stellar pace in recent times. The need for aviation and military drones has created a juggernaut of possibilities for growth within this market. Moreover, new applications of drones have come to the fore across several industries. This trend has paved way for increased investments to flow into the global drone logistics and transportation market.

That’s the conclusion of a recent review by Transparency Market Research (TMR), which decoded some of the leading factors pertaining to the growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). According to TMR, the importance of aerial inspection of terrains for a multitude of industries has driven market demand. Technological enhancements in the structuring and functionalities of UAVs have additionally impelled demand.

The TMR review is not confined solely to logistics and transportation, as it also delves into the relevance of drones across military, aviation, construction and entertainment sectors.

Advancements in Military Technologies. The use of drones in the defense sector has gathered momentum in recent times. The need for increased surveillance and reconnaissance in the military industry has played to the advantage of the vendors operating in the global market. Increasing anarchy among regional territories has also generated humongous demand within the global drone market, which can therefore count on increased revenues in the years to follow.

Use of Drones in Site Inspections. The construction industry has become a haven of new possibilities and technologies. Drones are extensively used to oversee operations in that sector, with the need to inspect terrains and unexplored lands creating a boatload of possibilities within the market.

UAVs in Logistics and Transportation is Looking Up. Recent drone developments in the sector cited in the TMR review include:

-Rising investments in drones by the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Uber, Google, FedEx and UPS are ushering in technological advancements and design innovations.

-Drone strategies being employed by Uber Technologies Inc., Flirtey, Zipline International, Drone Delivery Canada and Matternet. When it comes to just the latter two, Drone Delivery Canada has agreed to serve Moose Cree First Nation communities, while Matternet and Boeing HorizonX Ventures have partnered in drone delivery as well.

-A Beijing-based online business firm, which since 2016 has operated under an agreement to deliver commercial drones in four main regions spread over China, being online to have built 150 drone delivery services in the southwestern Sichuan region by the end of this year.

-The same firm planning to expand to Japan and Indonesia.

-India’s Zomato, which took over the drone startup TechEagle, developing a hub-to-hub transportation service supported by hybrid multi-rotor drones.

The Bottom Line. The revenue index of the drone logistics and transportation market is projected to improve in the times to come. Learn more about this, including industry challenges, at: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/drone-logistics-and-transportation-market.html.

More Drone Developments. Speaking of UPS, the Atlanta-based delivery and logistics giant earlier this year announced a series of new initiatives and partnerships aimed at upgrading its global logistics network that includes the expansion of drone operations in the healthcare sector. An initiative to test drone delivery use cases with Henry Schein, a worldwide distributor of medical and dental supplies, will allow UPS to focus on UAVs for one of its key business sectors. A huge factor in these tests will be ensuring successful deliveries of essential healthcare products to destinations where traditional road transport may be less effective or timely, such as remote communities or areas impacted by a natural disaster, according to UPS.

The UPS Flight Forward subsidiary drone business, which was only formed last year, received a highly-restricted air carrier certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that allows for approved UPS drones to fly over people, at night and out of the operator’s line of sight. After granting UPS Flight Forward the special certification, the FAA authorized the company to operate a drone delivery program at WakeMed Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina. Meanwhile, UPS in February expanded its Flight Forward service to the University of California at San Diego Health. That’s the result of another Mountain View, California-based Matternet partnership. That drone program will be used to transport various medical products between health centers and labs, with the drones following predetermined flight paths within visual line of sight per FAA rules. (Matt Coker)

Thank the Military Again. Yates Electrospace Corp. (YEC), whose Silent Arrow platform is bringing disruptive innovation to the heavy payload, unmanned cargo delivery market, announced the design completion and specifications of a wide-body version of its successful GD-2000 cargo delivery drone. With a full-scale, flight-ready version of the latter having been shown off at the Defense & Security Equipment International show in London in September 2019, the coming out for the GD-2000’s bigger sister is set for the July 20-24 run of the Farnborough International Airshow in the UK (coronavirus willing, of course).

Aliso Viejo, California-based YEC responded to real-time demand from U.S. and allied foreign government Special Operators, including the U.S. Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), for the development of the new wide-body craft. It will be 60 percent larger than the standard Silent Arrow GD-2000, with a  2,000-pound gross weight; a 48-foot wingspan (among four spring-deployed wings that are stowed in a 3.5×3.5×13-foot fuselage); and a 140-cubic-foot cargo bay that can handle up to 1,250 pounds (or five times more weight in life-saving supplies, medicines and tactical cargo than the GD-2000).

“The YEC engineering team used current flight data from the inaugural GD-2000 product line along with extensive computational fluid dynamics analysis to optimize the aerodynamics and glide ratio of this rather massive cargo delivery platform,” says Chip Yates, YEC’s founder and CEO, who noted an accelerated schedule led to the delivery of development units by the end of this past March and the setting of 10 flight test units throughout the second and third quarters of 2020. Don’t be surprised if Yates’ latest creation is a hit: The original Silent Arrow was named one of six “Unmanned Cargo Aircraft to Watch” by Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine in their 2020 Aerospace & Defense issue. (MC)

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Archives, Global Trade Daily, International Trade

Five Ways Businesses Changed Their Daily Operations for Good

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The future is arriving quickly. There’s already been talk about how COVID-19 has accelerated automation, and some jobs will be changed if they come back at all. There’s no doubt the recent pandemic is shaping how we do business, from restaurants and retail spaces to even how we manufacture goods. And with many states reopening in phases, or just outright reopening, what does “getting back to business” look like as we forge ahead?

The supply chain gets a wakeup call

During the pandemic, shortages of masks and hand sanitizer rocked many supermarkets like Walmart and Costco. With such a quick spike, and having such a large gap to fill in the supply chain, distilleries stepped in with safe, alcohol-based hand sanitizers. Clothing companies engineered their manufacturing process to make masks out of spare materials. Auto manufacturers teamed up to help produce ventilators. The list goes on.

One of the biggest attributes many companies needed to stay successful and stay in business? Flexibility. When stay-at-home orders went into effect, businesses had to figure things out overnight. That included a new way to make goods that people desperately needed.

The upside? Now you can see hand sanitizer in repurposed liquor bottles at many grocery stores across the U.S.

But all of this was a symptom of a larger issue.

“Early on, much of the economic impact that companies in the U.S. experienced were related to supply-side disruption due to shutdowns in other countries,” said Thomas Hartland-Mackie, President & CEO of City Electric Supply. “This pandemic has highlighted the danger of over-relying on a single manufacturing hub as well as a need to diversify sources to include local or domestic suppliers.”

With global trade, a smooth-functioning supply chain doesn’t exactly impact manufacturing. That is, until it gets rocky.

As a few supplies, like masks and hand sanitizers, reached mass critical demand all around the world, they plunged in availability. Hospitals, frontline workers, and more were left without protective gear required to safely do their jobs.

At the time, when these supplies were almost impossible to locate, domestic-made products were a necessity. They were easier to source and easier to ship when time was more important than ever. This could be the wakeup call manufacturing needs to move a little closer to home instead of relying on centralized factories on the other side of the world to fill gaps in the supply chain.

With this catastrophe still fresh in the minds of many businesses and governments, various shock scenarios will have to be considered more heavily to help rebuild the supply chain for a more resilient future.

Staying connected

The businesses that figured out how to stay connected with their customers, whether they were operating in a limited capacity or having to put business on hold completely, were the ones that added to their digital currency. But for most small businesses, digital currency could only take them so far. That meant developing alternative revenue streams to help them stay afloat, even if they were designated as essential businesses.

Restaurants and bars regularly teamed up with delivery services to help them maintain some cash flow during the lean months, including online ordering and curbside pickup. Personal trainers and fitness studios went digital with their classes to help keep their clients working out and to help keep their brand top of mind.

Other companies went a step further and identified gaps in the supply chain to fulfill in meaningful ways. As we mentioned before, distilleries helped make safe, alcohol-based hand sanitizers, and clothing companies reengineered their manufacturing process to make masks out of spare materials.

All of this helped these businesses either keep cash flowing into the business, or at the very least, kept them in the minds of their customers long enough until they could reopen. From creative online solutions that let them continue operating to doubling down on marketing efforts to keep in touch virtually, the ones that stayed flexible and stayed connected weathered the pandemic better than others.

But also, what about the flood of statements from companies preaching togetherness in the first few weeks of the pandemic? Did that help customers feel more connected to their favorite businesses? Hartland-Mackie certainly thinks so.

“We’ve all heard those jokes about how people are receiving too many long emails from businesses explaining what they’re doing in response to COVID-19, but the reality is that customers appreciate it,” said Hartland-Mackie. “Customers want to hear from the companies they are loyal to and be reassured – as long as it is authentic – that businesses have their customers in mind as they make decisions.”

Remote work is not remote

Working in offices could be a thing of the past. Already high-profile companies like Twitter have announced indefinite work-from-home plans for their employees, and more will probably follow their lead. In an age of digital nomads, this could be a huge selling point for attracting talented workers.

When the pandemic first started, many companies had to figure out how to work 100% digitally practically overnight. This involved utilizing web-based communication programs like Skype, Zoom, and Slack to ensure teams were in constant communication with each other when it mattered most. Now, with some offices opening back up, some employees could be receiving more lenient work from home policies, or, at the very least, there may be less face-to-face meetings in the workplace.

Another huge benefit to remote working becoming more commonplace? (Aside from less meetings, of course.) Embracing the all-digital transformation can boost productivity. Now with a lot of the same information freely available for employees to do their job, there should be less presentations sharing known information across the company. Now, only vital information can be created and shared, freeing up more resources to resolve the most critical issues at hand along with more focused daily agendas.

It’s not delivery, it’s curbside pickup

Well, it’s a little bit of both. For essential businesses that couldn’t take advantage of “contactless” delivery, the next best bet was curbside pickup.

“As a federally designated essential business, City Electric Supply branches have stayed open, but we needed to provide ways to keep customers and employees as safe as possible. We began offering curbside pickup and it’s been so successful that we’ve received feedback from customers asking us to continue it as an ongoing service,” Hartland-Mackie said.

What was once seen as an added-value service was the main way for many businesses to maintain cash flow when customers were no longer allowed inside. And with the latest reopening efforts, some customers are still opting for curbside pickup in lieu of shopping themselves.

With how convenient curbside pickup is for keeping in-store capacity low — and for saving the time of customers who no longer have to spend time shopping or even getting out of their vehicles — this could soon be the new normal for many businesses.

Temperature checks

Whether or not customers should receive temperature checks has been up for some debate, but temperature checks of employees are being implemented in almost all states in various industries, including food service and healthcare. Even though workers could be asymptomatic, it still helps cut down on cases progressing to severe stages and worsening infection rates.

This has also had a snowball effect on various other issues related to work policies, from sick leave to hazard pay. Most employers are erring on the side of caution, allowing employees to stay home if they or someone they come into regular contact with have health issues that put them at risk of infection.

With daily operations coming under such a heavy microscope, this means that even employers are examining how existing sick policies have hurt more than helped. If more lenient and flexible policies have not already been put in place, expect it to happen as phased reopening progresses.

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Brad McElory is a Copywriter at City Electric Supply

CaseWare
Archives, Global Trade Daily, News

CaseWare Launches Breakthrough Cloud Solutions to Better Connect Accountants, Auditors and Clients

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New product suite includes audit and client collaboration functionality, made-for-Canada analytics, and a streamlined accounting platform to benefit users at all stages of cloud adoption

As the Canadian accounting and auditing industries adapt to a new normal amid a changing world, where working in teams and engaging with clients must be done remotely, leading software provider CaseWare International Inc. has unveiled breakthrough technology solutions that will enable accountants and auditors to work smarter, faster and more cohesively, both now and for the long term.

“The role of accountant and auditor will be more important than ever in a post-pandemic financial world, where people will need to place even greater trust in numbers and accountability,” said Ross Hampton, CaseWare Head of Business Development – Americas.

“As a result, the speed with which firms transition to this new way of working – remotely and cohesively together – will radically increase,” Hampton said. “Before, many in the industry had a vision of one day transitioning to the cloud, but circumstances beyond all of our control are forcing accountants and auditors to do it now.”

The solutions included in the announcement are: CaseWare PBC Requests, CaseWare ReviewCompTax, CaseWare Audit and CaseWare AnalyticsAI. By bringing them together in one product suite – that seamlessly ties in with other CaseWare solutions such as Working Papers – the company is giving accountants the support they need to shift their entire practice to the cloud.

Each product is a standalone solution hosted in the secure CaseWare Cloud, providing users with the flexibility to choose the product or combination of products that best fits their particular needs as they engage in new ways of working, and giving them assurance that everyone involved will be working from one integrated workflow.

“We’re addressing the needs of users at all stages of cloud adoption – from forward-thinking firms who are already in the cloud, to firms that are just starting to transition, and those that may want to start small,” Hampton explained. “Everyone needs to be thinking about how the accounting role integrates with the audit role, and how both of those activities engage with clients to ensure everyone is working from the same data, with one workflow and one process to minimize risk.”

Key features and benefits of the suite of products include:

CaseWare PBC Requests

-A new add-on to the CaseWare Cloud platform, CaseWare PBC Requests – a centralized client cloud portal that serves as an excellent introduction to the cloud – allows firms to seamlessly collaborate with clients, securely manage requests, and streamline workflow related to obtaining information.

-Users gain a two-way, real-time communication flow with clients to quickly and securely send signed letters and documentation, receive client files and respond to requests.

-Real-time electronic status updates provide improved workflow visibility, creating transparency and ensuring requests are not forgotten or missed.

-Client requests are automatically aligned with engagement status and platform integration ensures information is synched between the cloud engagement file and Working Papers.

CaseWare ReviewCompTax

-Securely hosted in CaseWare Cloud, CaseWare ReviewCompTax is an end-to-end platform that enables accountants and auditors to perform review, notice to reader and tax engagements in a single location from a single database.

-Innovative web-based tools include 24/7 real-time access to client accounts and information, automatic updates, and shared dashboards to ensure everyone is working on the same documents and all communication is securely sent, received and tracked.

-Information is automatically updated throughout financial statements and tax returns, removing the need for multiple manual entries and reducing the likelihood for error.

CaseWare Audit

-An end-to-end, cloud-based audit solution, CaseWare Audit is securely hosted in CaseWare Cloud, removing risks associated with duplication of work and over or under auditing.

-Auditors leverage content to identify risk up front and optimize their audit workflow accordingly, performing only the work necessary with the ability to record and view engagement risk from anywhere within the file.

-Auditors have the ability to securely track all communications related to an audit file in one place, from initial assessment and interpretation, to risk identification, evidence gathering and reporting, eliminating the need to work with multiple email threads.

-Auditors are ensured a proper random sample for testing directly within an engagement.

CaseWare AnalyticsAI

-CaseWare AnalyticsAI provides the same artificial intelligence-based transactional analysis, tailored to reflect the way Canadian firms work and including Canadian templates for balance sheets and income statements.

-Easy-to-use analytic capabilities which can be integrated directly into Working Papers to allow auditors to perform analysis as part of their routine workflow.

-Entire data sets are quickly analyzed to find exceptions and identify areas of higher risk, allowing auditors to perform more accurate and thorough audits.

“Whether you’re an auditor looking for greater insights or an accountant working on multiple client requests or a compilation engagement, this product suite has the functionality you need, including basic functions such as tax returns and financial statements such as integrating tax and financials into one process,” Hampton said. “You can still do everything you need to do to run your business and meet client expectations, only working in the cloud means that you can do it better.”

To learn more about this Canadian suite of products, click here.

For information on the U.S. cloud product suite, click here.

supply chain
Archives, Global Logistics, Global Trade Daily, Stories

Leveraging Digital Technology to Create a More Resilient Supply Chain

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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the flow of goods across the globe, from raw materials to finished products. The pandemic has raised awareness of the importance of truck drivers, delivery drivers and warehouse workers who have kept products moving in this challenging environment. The economic ramifications have forced companies and industries to reevaluate their supply chains.

Additionally, the pandemic has vividly illustrated that today’s highly interlinked, international supply chains have more potential points of failure and less flexibility for absorbing delays and disruptions than business leaders may have realized.

To build more resilient and flexible supply chains, companies may consider several options, including bringing some critical activities closer to home, setting up backup suppliers to reduce exposure to any single supplier/country, or refining their inventory strategies. Of course, any such alteration will affect logistics and transportation.

Having the right combination of technology, expertise, people, and solutions in place is critical as companies revisit their supply chain strategies. Fortunately, leveraging supply chain technology can improve end-to-end visibility, resiliency, and efficiency within your supplier networks.

Advances in digital technology and automation are driving the continued evolution of supply chains. Some of the most impactful technologies can be grouped into three buckets:

Automation

-Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
-Configurable workflows

 

Digitization

-Artificial intelligence
-Machine learning
-Cloud computing

 

Big data

-Internet of Things

 

Companies in many industries currently employ these technologies. GlobalTranz uses these technology advances to enable and support our people.  We have used RPA to streamline many rote, operational tasks and allow our workforce to tackle more strategic, higher-value activities, particularly those which build relationships with our customers, suppliers, and partners. RPA creates a software robot leveraging a specific set of rules to automate tasks, such as document retrieval, inter-system data entry, approval processes, and gathering track and trace data. Unlike traditional custom-developed solutions, RPA can be continuously modified in a more real-time approach – especially important as the number of data sources and the sheer amount of data continues to increase.

By contextualizing data and reviewing daily processes, businesses can make complex and time-consuming processes more efficient. For example, when using RPA to gather track and trace data, you can be assured that the information is the most recent and accurate.

Before building bots to automate the collection of track-and-trace information, GlobalTranz devoted nearly 139 days’ worth of time annually, per person, to this task. Automation has enabled people to spend more time with customers and partners helping them devise strategies to address challenges brought on by COVID-19 and create a more resilient supply chain.

As companies look ahead to the economic recovery, it is imperative that they obtain greater visibility into their own facilities, their direct suppliers, and logistics partners. The crisis demonstrates the need for resiliency and accurate, real-time information that can help businesses make better-informed decisions and mitigate the costs of supply chain disruptions.

Obtaining accurate, real-time information to mitigate complexity and create resiliency requires a more digitized approach. Disruptive risks require investment in additional supply chain resilience even though the gains and the return on investment may not be immediate.

Successful organizational change, much like social change, can be influenced by the people and capabilities around us – including both stakeholders within your business and your supply chain partners – as well as how internal data and external intelligence are leveraged to make better business decisions.

Archives, Global Logistics, Global Trade Daily

How Technology can Improve your Logistics Operations

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Like most other industries, the logistics industry faces a gradual transformation towards adapting to the internet age. The advent of new technologies invalidates age-old approaches and processes, creating the need for modernization. And with the logistics industry being as massive as it is, it’s understandable that it can be notably lucrative. Between risk mitigation and automation, there are many ways in which adaptive technology can benefit this $4 trillion industry. With that said, let us explore just how technology can improve your logistics operation.

The significance of efficiency

Before delving into specifics, it is vital to note the undisputed value of efficiency in the logistics industry.

As mentioned before, this 4$ trillion industry is massive, and its interconnectivity with other industries is apparent. Thus, efficient logistics operations can yield considerable productivity gains across the board. Not only can they provide a competitive advantage, but they can also guarantee better overall operation cohesion. Logistics software can greatly enhance one’s control and oversight of supply chains, increasing response times to potential disruptions. After all, customers of all industries value a swift delivery of goods and services, as well as quality customer support. Such software can augment all of those aspects, ensuring that potential challenges are easier to overcome.

Shipment Tracking Systems and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

A technology that has already caught on, albeit to varying degrees, is shipment tracking. As customers would previously be unaware of their order’s status, shipment tracking systems have rectified this somewhat. With 24/7 access to shipment status information, customers can rest assured that their order is indeed underway. Some tracking systems even offer additional information and shipment notifications for additional insights and convenience. This solution can indeed improve your logistics too, no less than customer experience. Constant monitoring can save your time and money, as well as unclog your customer service channels.

Likewise, on the front of cargo management, RFID technology has also seen use in recent years. In essence, RFID tags or sensors allow companies to keep track of their inventory. Both labor-saving and cost-effective, RFID tags are often used in distribution warehouses as a means of monitoring containers. Such industries as the apparel industry are also using RFID technology for tracking purposes, with very notable success. Should you be contemplating how technology can improve your logistics operation, RFID solutions could be a reasonable step to take.

Automation and robotics

On the subject of warehouse optimization, then, technology has provided another asset; automation. Naturally, automation can yield many benefits to many industries, but logistics is unquestionably one of them. From increased performance to reduced labor costs, automation is undoubtedly a valuable asset.

Automation offers to improve operational efficiency in machines, and has already seen effective use in such trade hubs as Holland’s Port of Rotterdam. Namely, its use of fully-automated terminals allows it to reap the aforementioned benefits in terms of unloading cargo. It’s estimated that this approach increases overall productivity by as much as 30 percent – a very notable net benefit.

Similarly, robots have facilitated the rapid growth of online sales across many industries. While they are quite dissimilar from automation in many regards, they too can automate operations and thus decrease labor costs. Most notably, as far as e-commerce is concerned, Amazon has been innovative in this front. Its use of Kiva robots has reduced the company’s expenses by as much as 20 percent. A notable feat, enough so that other companies also seek to employ robots in their warehouses.

Drones and autonomous vehicles

In much the same way as automation and robotics, technology has provided logistics companies with drones and autonomous vehicles. Similar in function, both can be fine examples of how technology can improve your logistics operation.

Drones have seen surges in functionality in recent times, elevated from a niche solution to one with potentially global applications. This development was understandably followed by an array of eager high-profile adopters, such as UPS. A potential innovation in terms of product delivery indeed, drones can expand delivery options to both urban and rural areas. More fortunately still, their nature allows them to also improve logistics, by removing the factor of human error.

Likewise, autonomous vehicles can offer similar convenience. In part due to relatively lower regulations and easier testing, self-driving vehicles have been an accessible technological advancement for many logistics operations. Of course, it’s notable that this technology is currently mostly limited to warehouse management, such as autonomous forklifts and trucks. However, with rapid advancements, it may not be long before autonomous trucks can traverse the world’s highways. Both in their current and potential future forms, autonomous vehicles can quite possibly be a massive asset to any company.

Conclusion

As technology makes rapid strides, one can realistically expect vast logistics optimization potential. From warehouse management and monitoring to shipment tracking and delivery, the possibilities seem endless. When contemplating how technology can improve your logistics operation, both the present and the future hold much promise. And as supply chains expand and grow, it will be vital to adapt to such technologies to remain competitive.

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James Clarkson is a freelance web designer and author. He often writes analyses of the shipping and moving industries, and of the SEO needs of both. He’s a frequent writer for Verified Movers, as well as other companies.

Archives, Global Trade Daily, News

Cloud Logistics Selected to Support $340 million Pork & Poultry Processing Facility

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Privately held pork and poultry producer and handler, Prestage Foods, announced the selection and implementation of E2open’s TMS  platform, Cloud Logistics,  to support operations at the company’s new $340 million pork processing facility.
“We are opening a new $340 million pork processing facility and need a transportation management system to help us manage the logistics operations,” said Crystal Hill, director of supply chain and logistics at Prestage Foods. “We’re opening our new facility in less than a month, so we needed a TMS that we could deploy quickly. The system had to be easy to use so our carriers and our poultry logistics team could adopt it without much training. We work with dozens of carriers and add more all the time so having a TMS that carriers love to use is a key differentiator for Cloud Logistics. Finally, we required a TMS that will grow and scale with us as our needs change. We will start with a few truckloads per day but will grow to over 50 a day within the first year and double to over 100 trucks a day when a second shift is added. Whether it’s managing a few truckloads a day from one shipping location or hundreds across multiple locations, the Cloud Logistics TMS is a great fit that will support our business today and into the future at a great price point.”
Cloud Logistics combines automation features such as mobile and social technology. The platform provides Prestage with a seamless, comprehensive workflow well equipped to support current and future initiatives all at a reasonable price. With Prestage anticipating a 1,000% increase in overall daily shipments from the new facility, the company will heavily rely on the TMS from automation and carrier selections, to load tendering and invoice auditing.
“For the senior leadership team, the most compelling reason to partner with Cloud Logistics was to improve operational efficiencies and visibility,” said Jere Null, chief operating officer at Prestage Foods. “This is a business that requires accuracy, timeliness, and cost effectiveness, in order to scale rapidly. Prestage Foods is growing fast, and Cloud Logistics will enable us to handle significant volume growth without adding additional headcount to the pork logistics team. We are also excited about the advanced reporting capabilities that will give us greater control of our operations.”
Source: BSYA