Bad things are bound to happen in your supply chain. Are you ready for them?

APICS and APICS Supply Chain Council have expanded their offerings to members and affiliates.

Over the last several years, the biopharmaceutical industry worldwide has intensified its focus on quality in manufacturing - but with little to show for it. Manufacturing quality levels remain well below those in other industries, such as semiconductor manufacturing and aerospace. And major recalls are still all too common.

An efficient supply chain is one of the most crucial predictors of a company's success. The supply chain affects almost every marker for industry leadership, including costs, delivery performance and overall customer satisfaction. It's understandable then that the majority of supply chain executives consider visibility to be the most important aspect of any supply chain solution.

Healthcare supply chains have all the challenges of supply chains in other industries, but they also have unique issues that add an extra measure of complexity: The strict government regulations that healthcare supply chains must conform to increase the difficulty of balancing speed, visibility and control. Here's a look at some of the problems healthcare companies face in supply chain management.

BJC HealthCare joins with Cardinal Health and Cook Medical in a three-way pilot to apply RFID tags to items at the supplier stage. Will their success goad a technologically backward industry to follow suit, and eliminate billions of dollars of waste from the supply chain?