Supply chain optimization is at the heart of a four-year plan by Kellogg's to save up to $475m a year by 2018. The company estimates that by the end of 2017, Project K will reduce the company's global workforce by about seven percent.
As private equity has expanded over the last 20 years, being able to make a profit from companies has become more difficult. Gone are the days when a good purchase price, a touch of financial engineering and finding a bigger buyer were all it took to make a profit.
UHC announced that its member academic medical centers achieved record supply chain savings and value of $400m in 2012. The saving amount represents five percent of UHC members' record aggregated spend of $8.1bn and includes cash returns as well as operational savings.
Electronic invoicing isn't new, writes Nigel Taylor of GXS. It started over 40 years ago with business-to-business (B2B) electronic data interchange (EDI) within private networks. With the advent of the internet in the '90s, e-procurement portals appeared and sparked a frenzy of investment into online industry communities. The e-procurement portals focused on sourcing and purchasing activities, and this narrow focus inevitably led to internet portals dedicated to payables processing.
