Vitaly Glozman, partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, outlines the current state and future of supply-chain operations in the biopharmaceuticals industry, with an eye toward achieving both short- and long-term goals.
On July 17, a wide range of third-party products on Amazon showed special pricing: one cent. The pricing glitch was, yet again, caused by some third-party integration and a coding error.
Supply chains are just as susceptible to faddish behavior as anything else. We're social animals, so we tend to follow the crowd - especially if we believe that the crowd has a competitive edge. That's why so many companies flocked to China over the last couple of decades, in search of ever-cheaper sources of production. Or why outsourcing became such a hot trend over that same period of time.
Performance metrics for warehouses and distribution centers have steadily improved since 2003, when the Warehousing Education and Research Council first conducted its annual "DC Measures" study, says Joe Tillman, senior researcher at Supply Chain Visions and co-author of the study. Moreover, the gap has significantly narrowed between best-in-class companies and those lower on the performance scale, he says.
