supply-chain management

Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting
by Ashutosh Deshmukh
Published 13 Dec 2005

Retrieved July 21, 2003, from www.sap.com/ Supply chain event management with mySAP supply chain management (white paper). (2003). SAP. Retrieved July 22, 2003, from www.sap.com/ Supply chain execution with mySAP supply chain management (white paper). (2003). SAP. Retrieved July 22, 2003, from www.sap.com/ The inventory collaboration hub in mySAP supply chain management, SAP solutions brief. (2003). SAP. Retrieved July 23, 2003, from www.sap.com/ Transportation management with mySAP SCM, SAP solutions in detail. (2003). SAP. Retrieved July 23, 2003, from www.sap.com/ Visibility with mySAP supply chain management, SAP solutions brief. (2003). SAP.

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Additionally, the areas of procurement cards, online management of expenses and payroll, and online travel centers are covered. Chapter VII deals with the conversion cycle. The focus in this chapter is not on production activities but on supply chain management. The production function is now part of an extended collaborative enterprise in many organizations. Cost accounting is not merely assessing product costs but also striving to identify and optimize costs across the supply chain. Basic principles of supply chain management, software tools for supply chain management, and changes in cost accounting are covered here. Finally, Chapter VIII considers the general ledger cycle. This chapter discusses the evolution of the general ledger and financial reporting.

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References Bowersox, Closs, D., & Cooper, B. (2002). Supply chain logistics management (international ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. Cloud, R. (2000, August). Supply Chain Management: New role for finance professionals. Strategic Finance, 29-32. Cooke, J. (2002, March). Why Ace is becoming the place? Logistics Management, 3436. Coordination with mySAP supply chain management (white paper). (2003). SAP. Retrieved July 7, 2003, from www.sap.com/ Creating a networked value chain with Oracle supply chain management (white paper). (2003). Oracle. Retrieved July 8, 2003, from www.oracle.com/ E-business solution for financial management (white paper). (2003).

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It
by Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan
Published 15 Mar 2014

The Economist also noted the intrinsic link between globalization and supply chains: “Globalisation requires greatly increased co-ordination of transport by road, rail, sea, air and now also by an entirely new route to market: the internet. This makes logistics vastly more complex. The job of ensuring that all these things work together is known as supply-chain management.”5 Globalization and supply chains have a symbiotic relationship. Although this section focuses on how the rise of international trade created longer and deeper supply networks, it is important to remember that these networks, in turn, fuel globalization. In this chapter we diagnose the risks of supply chain management and of global business management more generally. As in the case of the financial sector, we show that the efficiency benefits of globalization have associated risks and that profit-maximizing behavior can create negative externalities.

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We start by noting the rise of international trade in the twenty-first century. We examine how political changes and technological innovation gave rise to global supply chains. An analysis of “best practices” in supply chain management shows how these supply networks are vulnerable to systemic risk. We then seek to identify ways to make supply networks more resilient. This chapter’s conclusion draws lessons for systemic thinking from supply chain management and considers how the resilience and robustness of the system may be improved. GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS We begin by considering the rise of global supply chains in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

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Reprinted from Stefano Battiston et al., 2007, “Credit Chains and Bankruptcy Propagation in Production Networks,” Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 31 (6): 2061–2084, diagrams on 2073. Used with permission from Elsevier. Learning from Supply Chains Many supply chain managers are aware of the risks we have discussed. In a recent survey of international supply chain managers, McKinsey and Company found that product complexity and financial volatility were among the most important determinants of supply chain strategies.48 Their survey also documents that these professionals perceived supply chain risk as being greater in 2008 than in 2006.

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age
by Simon Head
Published 14 Aug 2003

Supply chains can be shortened and lengthened, formed and reformed, rejigged and replanned, with a speed and ease inconceivable in Ford's time. But this does not mean that the job of supply chain management has grown more complex. In Ford's time, the supply chain manager had to set up his own system of runners to monitor the supply chain and make sure that it was working properly. If the chain was in danger of coming apart, the manager had to work out the solution on the spot. If shifts in market conditions required that the supply chain be recalculated, the manager had to do the recalculating. Among the skills of a contemporary supply chain manager, with the help of user-friendly graphs and charts, is to make sense of the information the system sends to his workstation.

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The third element was labeled human resources and included such things as personnel administration, planning, and development. 153 154 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONOMY From the mid-1990s onward, SAP's success in marketing software products that integrate these three functions gave rise to the new acronym ERP. It has remained a convention of the industry that ERP refers to the integration of these activities—logistics, accounting, and human resource management. Processes whose integration with this inner core has come later, such as customer relations management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) are usually described as add-ons to the original ERP. In a 1999 report on ERP, Deloitte Consulting estimated that in 1998 SAP had a 66 percent share of the U.S. market, and Oracle an 11 percent share.1 Despite its obscurity, ERP is therefore a driving force in the reshaping of American business, particularly in service industries.

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Continuing in this over-heated vein, Deloitte tells its clients that it is not "by simply turning the system on, but by forcefully moving into the deeper journey [that] the full capabilities and benefits of the ERP-enabled enterprise are found."33 In its early stages, at least, this "deeper journey" passes through some of the flattest topography of the business landscape—customer relations management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM). In both spheres, scientific management is firmly established as the controlling philosophy of management, so the closer integration of these two processes with the existing processes of ERP simply reinforces the already dominant role of scientific management in the workings of ERP.

The Unusual Billionaires
by Saurabh Mukherjea
Published 16 Aug 2016

Amongst its competitors, Asian Paints is the only other firm which has initiated similar steps like its Home Solutions and Color Consultancy services. Improving supply chain management: In the absence of centralized supply chain management infrastructure, managing inventory levels becomes a tough task. Data analytics can be used to improve forecasting demand at a pan-India level; however, without proper supply chain infrastructure, even data analytics cannot achieve much. Whilst Asian Paints took the lead in installing a technologically advanced centralized supply chain management and ERP system over 1999–2002, Berger implemented a similar technological advancement in its distribution channel in 2012 in collaboration with Oracle.

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Most paint manufacturers focus on high-quality management recruits, but only Asian Paints recruits from the top B-schools of India for junior and mid-level managerial roles. Ambit’s consumer sector team believes that on these above mentioned six parameters, Asian Paints scores best on supply chain management, product range, marketing initiatives and quality of management professionals. Berger scores best on product range (alongside Asian Paints) and benefits to dealers/painters. Berger is just a shade behind Asian on some parameters (like supply chain management and quality of management professionals), but on almost all parameters, it is significantly ahead of the remaining large Indian paints companies, namely Kansai Nerolac and Akzo Nobel.

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A former employee of Asian Paints recalls, ‘All credit to the directors that they understood that if we have to keep the flag flying, we had to have a relook at several aspects of the business, like technology, formulations, etc.’ Separately, the professional management team shifted the firm’s focus of relying on in-house development of Information Technology (IT) infrastructure to procuring IT from third-party vendors. In 1999, the first phase of this included procuring software for supply chain management from i2 Technologies (a US-based company), which centralized and automated a large part of the process of demand forecasting, production planning and raw material procurement. The second phase included setting up of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software in July 2000 across India. During our discussions with him, Anand said, ‘The demand forecasting offered by i2’s software helped us a lot.

The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business
by Richard Brooks
Published 2 Jan 2014

In 2010 Glaxo reported worldwide pre-tax profits of £4.5bn but appeared to pay little if any UK corporation tax, showing benefits from the tax credits and from using Singapore’s special tax status of around £115m and £80m respectively.‌9 AstraZeneca, a similarly enthusiastic tax haven user, in 1999 ensured that what would turn out to be its blockbuster anti-cholesterol drug Crestor (with sales over $5bn by 2010), was licensed around the world from the Caribbean tax haven of Puerto Rico.‌10 The company now shaves several hundreds of millions of dollars off its annual tax bill by using such territories.‌11 ‘Tax-efficient supply chain management’ – as it has become known in one of those obfuscatory tax euphemisms – offers huge scope for tax dodging as established and newer tax havens bend over backwards to host the management, intellectual property, financing and other facets of a business that can be commoditized, moved and priced.

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Our biggest corporate visitors feed from it every bit as greedily. Over here and under-taxed The same post-war growth in international markets that allowed British multinationals to strike out abroad also opened up the domestic market’s sixty million consumers to their foreign counterparts. And by the late 1990s ‘tax efficient supply chain management’ was enabling them to access this source of profit while making precious little tax contribution to Britain’s public coffers. The trick again is to own anything of any value somewhere convenient. So Nike’s British stocks are owned by a Dutch company called Nike European Operations Netherlands BV while the business of selling them on its behalf is performed by British company Nike (UK) Ltd.

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Fast forward to 2009 and 2010, and the move provided some comfort for the struggling retailer. The £25m losses of Dutch-incorporated but UK tax resident Gap Netherlands BV swamped the profits of the UK commission company GPS (Great Britain) Ltd and the tax bill vanished.‌14 The effect of tax-efficient supply chain management on UK tax payments hit the headlines in 2012 when Reuters analysed a series of US companies’ contributions and found that Starbucks had paid just £8.3m tax on several billions of pounds’ worth of sales since 1998 and nothing for several years. At the same time it had been telling investors – as anybody strolling along a high street would agree – that its British operations were prospering.

The Cultural Logic of Computation
by David Golumbia
Published 31 Mar 2009

(WalMart 2007) In typical computationalist fashion, this language explicitly gestures at benefits for individual consumers while eliding altogether the main reason for which Wal-Mart uses computer systems, which is to maximize profit by minimizing a variety of previously smooth spaces in the supply chain— here, the space devoted to warehousing excess product or left empty due to selling faster than predicted. Wal-Mart’s implementation of a variety of ERP software packages for supply-chain management creates pressure in several nodes in the economic system. Now Wal-Mart’s suppliers must either themselves implement supply-chain management systems, or risk the same warehousing issues that used to be the provenance of Wal-Mart itself; in turn, other companies are pressured both externally and internally to comply with Wal-Mart’s system, which in the most usual case involves implementation of similar computer systems.

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Surprisingly, though, despite the ways in which Friedman’s first three benefits replicate colonial logic and largely benefit large corporations, the rest of his ten “forces” are even more explicitly focused on corporations. In fact, they are largely devoted to exactly the kinds of business-process tools discussed in Chapter 7: ERP, CRM, and other supply-chain management software. Friedman champions open source software, especially Linux, but primarily because IBM realized that it could profit from the distributed community that had created it (which is itself largely made up of corporate employees working without compensation in their free time); arguably, we still talk about Linux precisely because of its utility to profitmaking corporations.

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Yes, Linux was created through distributed means, but how the outsourcing of work to essentially donated labor contributes to economic or cultural flatness remains a mystery. Then Friedman champions the “withering global competition” (149) enabled by WTO-backed treaties and IT-fueled communication via what he calls “offshoring”; the supply-chain management techniques used by Wal-Mart: “as consumers, we love supply chains, because they deliver us all sorts of goods—from tennis shoes to laptop computers—at lower and lower prices and tailored more and more precisely to just what we want” (155), despite the fact that “as workers, we are sometimes ambivalent or hostile to these supply chains, because they expose us to higher and higher pressures to compete, and force our companies to cut costs, and also, at times, cut wages and benefits” (ibid.).

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris
Published 6 Mar 2007

They analyze historical sales and pricing trends to establish prices in real time and get the highest yield possible from each transaction. They use sophisticated experiments to measure the overall impact or “lift” of advertising and other marketing strategies and then apply their insights to future analyses. Strange Bedfellows? At first glance, supply chain management and customer relationship management would seem to have little in common. Supply chain management, on the one hand, seems like a natural fit for an analytical focus. For years, operations management specialists have created algorithms to help companies keep minimal levels of inventory on hand while preventing stock-outs—among other supply chain challenges.

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The next chapter, which addresses the use of analytics in external (e.g., customer and supplier) relationships, offers even more possibilities for competition. 5 COMPETING ON ANALYTICS WITH EXTERNAL PROCESSES Customer and Supplier Applications ANALYTICS TOOK A GREAT LEAP forward when companies began using them to improve their external processes—those related to managing and responding to customer demand and supplier relationships. Once kept strictly segregated, the boundaries between customer relationship management (CRM) processes such as sales and marketing and supply chain management (SCM) processes such as procurement and logistics have been broken down by organizations seeking to align supply and demand more accurately. Unlike internal processes that lie completely within the organization’s direct control, externally focused processes require cooperation from outsiders, as well as their resources.

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Yu and his team began by integrating all the elements of their supply chain in order to coordinate supplier sourcing decisions. To determine the optimal sourcing strategy (determining the right mix of joint replenishment, coordinated replenishment, and single sourcing) as well as manage all the logistics to get a product from manufacturer to customer, Amazon.com applies advanced optimization and supply chain management methodologies and techniques across its fulfillment, capacity expansion, inventory management, procurement, and logistics functions. For example, after experimenting with a variety of packaged software solutions and techniques, Yu concluded that no existing approach to modeling and managing supply chains would fit their needs.

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

That’s because there are practically no barriers preventing entry to entrepreneurship online: if you’ve got a laptop and a credit card, you’re in business. But manufacturing was always seen as something else entirely. Making stuff is expensive; it needs equipment and skills in everything from machining to supply-chain management. It usually requires huge up-front investments, and mistakes lead to warehouses of unsellable inventory. Failure may be celebrated online, where the cost of entry is relatively low, but in the world of making stuff, failing means ruination. Atoms are weighty, and so are the consequences of their failure.

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It’s gotten a lot of use since then, and I’ve since upgraded to a second-generation machine—the “Thing-O-Matic.”) Racks of components were lined up for the next batch, and laser cutters were humming their way through stacks of thin plywood for the frames. The creators were learning the realities of supply-chain management the hard way—those boxes couldn’t go out until the last parts were in them, but some components hadn’t arrived in time and others had arrived defective. A MakerBot has hundreds of parts, and if just one of them is missing, it can’t ship. The alternative to what I was seeing—scores of boxes waiting for weeks to be completed—is to over-order everything to ensure that all the components are always in stock.

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Somebody has to do the manufacturing, handle the inventory, get the liability insurance, and run the customer support, and that takes money, a legal structure, and real day-to-day responsibilities. Thus, a company. So, in the new manufacturing model, you need a new kind of manufacturing company, too. At its core, it has to incorporate all the skills and learning of traditional manufacturing companies—tight quality control, efficient inventory management, and supply-chain management—so that it can compete with them on basic price and quality. But it also needs to incorporate many of the skills of Web companies in creating and harnessing a community around its products that allow it to design new goods faster, better, cheaper. In short, it must be like the best hardware companies and the best software companies.

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less
by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou
Published 15 Feb 2015

Chapter 3 explains how customers are becoming ever more demanding. They increasingly want tailored products and services where and when they desire. It describes the trend towards mass customisation, and how new tools (such as robotics and 3D printers) and new approaches (such as social manufacturing and continuous production) can help operations and supply chain managers “flex” their production, logistics and service assets to satisfy demanding customers better and more cheaply. It draws on examples from cars (BMW and Volkswagen), pharmaceuticals (GSK and Novartis), cement (Cemex), soft drinks (Coca-Cola) and energy (GDF-Suez and GE). The goal of flexing assets is not only about saving resources, such as carrying less inventory, but also about saving time – a business’s most valuable resource.

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Sharing data with partners Collecting real-time demand signals is useless without also sharing those insights with suppliers and distributors. This is especially important in heavily outsourced multi-tiered supply chains. Otherwise, firms risk playing a game of phone tag that leads to mis-communication and distorted demand signals being perceived by upstream suppliers. This is why Cemex, a cement supplier, has integrated its supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems to respond better to customer inquiries, co-ordinate distribution processes with partners, and streamline operations at its distribution terminals. Cemex estimates this SCM/CRM integration – implemented with its technology partner, SAP – has saved it millions of dollars since 2005 through lower freight costs, fewer calls to the customer care centre and higher productivity during peak hours at its terminals.

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The company has managed 29% more customer transactions with the same headcount, delivered over 99% of its orders on time without problems (up from 95%), and halved the volume of calls regarding account information. More and more manufacturers are also investing in tools that provide end-to-end supply chain visibility. This helps them detect changes and disruptions at all stages of production and distribution, and then alert partners. Supply chain management tools have always been good at providing order management, order status and total cost; with outsourcing, though, companies also want their external partners and customers to have this information. According to KPMG’s 2013 Global Manufacturing Outlook, nearly 50% of the manufacturers surveyed lack visibility beyond their tier 1 partners, and less than 10% can evaluate the impact of supply chain disruptions within hours.

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage
by Douglas B. Laney
Published 4 Sep 2017

Generally Accepted Information Principles Like a world traveler who gains an appreciation for different cultures, bringing home and embracing the best of each, let’s look at what we can “bring home” to the land of information management from the world of asset management. Over the next couple chapters, we’ll be exploring asset management standards, principles, and methods we can borrow from a variety of other disciplines, including: physical asset management, supply chain management, IT, and software asset management—and from records management, intellectual property management, and even library science, among others. For framing a set of information asset management doctrine, let’s turn to yet another standard: the U.S. accounting set of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

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Do they really sense and respond and adapt to both immediate and gradual shifts in their larger environment the way biological ecosystems do? Only if someone coded them that way. Someday soon we will witness an entire supply chain driven by a neural network. Perhaps we should be conceiving and planning for that day. Already, certain players in certain supply chains manage and store much of the information flow. Think: Walmart. Or Coca-Cola. As Don Keough, the former president of Coke once said, “Whoever has information fastest and uses it wins.”3 It’s probably something Sun Tzu once said, too.4 In Japan, keiretsus are the renowned corporate ecosystems formed around trust, sharing, collaboration, and coordination.

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Similarly, services that the information organization provides application developers, IT, and business users can and should be defined along the lines of ITSM and common enterprise content management (ECM) practices and principles. Too often, even in mature information organizations, the services and resources they provide and how to engage them are ill-defined when compared to the discipline of IT service management. However, the supply chain management (SCM) discipline instructs that it’s not possible to pre-plan and predefine all the ways assets are going to be leveraged. Remember, a well-oiled supply chain process has the equal ability to handle make-to-stock and make-to-order requirements. Even the best data lake or DAAS architecture isn’t going to be able to accommodate all information needs.

Construction Project Management
by S. Keoki Sears
Published 7 Feb 2015

It could be defective material. It could be the wrong item or an item that has not been approved. Managing the supply chain affects all aspects of the project. As previously indicated, it directly impacts budget and schedule. Improper supply chain management can also affect cash flow, customer relations, and reputation. It behooves the project manager to understand general concepts of supply chain management and to be able to manage the supply chain for the specific materials on the project. One way to understand the supply chain is to diagram the steps from the point of origin to the point of installation. The point of origin for construction would typically be a supplier or distributor, but the process actually begins with the specification by the designer and generally follows these steps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

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It developed from the Japanese automobile industry, specifically Toyota, but has evolved into broad application across the manufacturing industry and now is being adapted for application in the construction context. Lean production addresses all aspects of the manufacturing process, including design, the supply chain, and the manufacturing component. Similarly, lean construction addresses all aspects of the construction process, including design, supply chain management, and field operations. It considers in detail many subcategories in these general areas, such as safety, quality, and efficiency of field operations. The brief treatment of lean construction in this text will focus on managing the construction process. For a much more comprehensive understanding of lean principles applied to construction, the reader is referred to the Lean Construction Institute at leanconstruction.org. 147 148 6 Production Planning When focused on construction operations, the lean construction process begins with production planning prior to commencement of construction.

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For building construction, similar problems must be resolved; however, since most building construction takes place in urban areas, additional questions need to be considered such as traffic and constrictions to urban thoroughfares. The planning should consider not only getting equipment and materials to the site but also offloading them from their conveyance in very tightly constricted areas. Supply chain management becomes a significant problem as construction projects increase in size and scope, in complexity, and in terms of schedules and budgets that continually become tighter. A thorough investigation of onsite and offsite utilities is necessary. Such needs as the closest rail siding and dock facility may play an important part in getting materials to the site.

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality
by Scott Belsky
Published 31 Mar 2010

If you develop the capacity to organize yourself and those around you, you can beat the odds. Your Approach to Organization and the Destiny of Your Ideas Supply chain management is a heavily logistical aspect of business that seldom attracts much fanfare. Companies like Wal-Mart and Toyota are legendary for how well they distribute and manage inventory. There is no debate that the mechanics of a company—especially its supply chain management practices—help determine the costs, quality, and availability of the product. There are consulting firms and executive-level positions within companies dedicated entirely to managing the supply chain—the embodiment of organization within a company.

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There are consulting firms and executive-level positions within companies dedicated entirely to managing the supply chain—the embodiment of organization within a company. At the same time, many of us don’t really associate such tasks with creativity and ideas. Since 2004, AMR Research, a leading authority on supply chain research that serves numerous Fortune 500 companies, has published an annual list of the twenty-five companies with the best supply chain management. You might be surprised to learn that Apple debuted on the list at No. 2 in 2007, and overtook companies such as Anheuser-Busch, Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, and Toyota to take the No. 1 slot in 2008. Why would Apple, a company known for new ideas and its ability to “think different,” also be one of the most organized companies on the planet?

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Tech Portfolio Post-it note Postrel, Virginia Priceline.com Prince-Ramus, Joshua prioritization Darwinian Energy Line and urgent vs. important tasks processing procrastination Procter & Gamble productivity, flexibility and progress project-centric vs. location-centric approaches project management breaking projects into primary elements meetings for plateaus and PSFK.com Publishers Lunch Purple Santa experiment R Randal, Jason RCRD LBL reactionary work flow Rebel Sell, The (Heath and Potter) Reboot Network recognition Red Bull Reed Space References chronological pile for discarding distinguishing Action Steps from filing labeling processing questioning Renoir, Pierre-Auguste responsibility grid restrictions rewards happiness as incremental play as recognition as short-term REX R/GA Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Rodriguez, Diego Rojas, Peter Rothstein, Jesse routines, work ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) Rutterford, Stephen S Sagmeister, Stefan sandbox environments San Francisco Chronicle Sawyer, Keith schedules, work School of Visual Arts Schorr, Max Schwartz, Barry Scientific American Mind self-awareness self-leadership backward clock contrarianism and deviants and entrepreneurship and failure and ambiguity and love and self-awareness in visionary’s narcissism and self-marketing self-reliance serendipity SETI Institute shipping Sisley, Alfred SixDegrees.com skepticism Slate.com social networks social power Southwest Airlines Spaces feature Spear, Josh Spence, Roy Spencer, Percy LeBaron Staple, Jeff Staple Design START/STOP/CONTINUE approach Steinhart Aquarium storytelling Stravinsky, Igor structure change and work routines Stutman, Randall Substance of Style, The (Postrel) Sun Microsystems supply chain management support Sutton, Robert T Tarter, Jill Taylor, James team wikis TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference Texas the99percent.com Thinc Design Thomas, Frank thrashing Threadless 3Com 3M Times Square Total Recall (Bell) Toyota transparency Trickey, Keith Truslow, Sam 21 Dinner Twitter two-minute rule U unique features urgent vs. important tasks V Vans Vimeo visionary’s narcissism visual organization W waiting waiting in line Walker Digital Wal-Mart Washington Post Weblogs, Inc.

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics
by Thomas H. Davenport and Jinho Kim
Published 10 Jun 2013

Games are another approach to communicating analytical results and models. They can be used to communicate how variables interact in complex relationships. For example, the “Beer Game,” a simulation based on a beer company’s distribution processes, was developed at MIT in the 1960s, and has been used by thousands of companies and students to teach supply chain management models and principles such as the “bullwhip effect”—the oscillation in order volumes resulting from poor information among supply chain participants. Other companies are beginning to develop their own games to communicate specific objectives. Trucking company Schneider National has developed a simulation-based game to communicate the importance of analytical thinking in dispatching trucks and trailers.

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However, the same creative company employs rigorous processes and analytics in its supply chain operations to ensure that it has the right products at the right time for sale. In its Apple retail stores, for example, it collects and analyzes considerable amounts of data. One article reported, “Once a product goes on sale, the company can track demand by the store and by the hour, and adjust production forecasts daily.”1 An open job description for a supply chain management position at Apple requires, among other things, that the successful applicant “Must combine a working knowledge of world-class supply chain practices, strong analytical capabilities, and business savvy.”2 If even highly creative companies like Apple require analytical orientations in many of their employees, we’ll probably see many more combinations of creativity and analytics in the future.

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The company has a very complex global supply chain, and doesn’t manufacture most of the products it sells. As Kevin Harrington, vice president of global business operations in Cisco’s Customer Value Chain Management organization put it: “Forecasting customer demand is, of course, a central part of supply chain management and a critical enabler of lean manufacturing. This discipline becomes ever more challenging in times like our own characterized by rapid changes in the macro-economy and volatile swings in supply and demand. In fact, Cisco’s need to write off some unused inventory [$2.25 billion worth] after the dotcom bust in 2001 provided some of the impetus for the larger transformation of our value chain.”10 The resulting project is a good illustration not only of analytical thinking, but of good relationships between quantitative analysts and business decision makers.

The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences
by Rob Kitchin
Published 25 Aug 2014

An accompanying set of studies needs to examine what happens when social–technical systems are linked together to create new, larger systems in which significant data amplification effects occur. The technologies underpinning big data, and the data themselves through their relationality, are ripe for such scalings. Indeed, complex socio-technical assemblages, such as a large retailer like Walmart, are increasingly interconnecting various systems (e.g., supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, store management, and security systems) that generate forms of directed, automated and volunteered data to create complex and sophisticated data-driven organisations that have diverse consequences for suppliers, employees, and consumers.

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Over the past 60 years information systems have thus become essential support infrastructures for all organisations of any size, enabling them to track and manage complex assemblages of people (staff, members, supporters, donors, customers), components, commodities and infrastructures across time and space, and enabling them to scale their operations from the local to the global (Castells 1996; Dicken 2003). Information systems allow an organisation to be run more intelligently, producing significant cost savings in their operational base. Three such data-driven information system that have been widely adopted are Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply-chain Management (SCM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). These systems facilitate greater coordination and control within an organisation, and with other organisations and customers. ERP, for example, standardises and combines an organisation’s multiple databases and systems (relating to purchasing, warehousing, inventory, transport, marketing, accounting, personnel management and rostering, project management, customer relations) into one all-encompassing system that ensures that data and processes are automatically and seamlessly available from one part of a business to another (Dery et al. 2006; Grant et al. 2006).

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Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, Washington, DC. http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0m2.pdf (last accessed 21 October 2013). Chignard, S. (2013) ‘A brief history of open data’, Paris Tech Review, 29 March, http://www.paristechreview.com/2013/03/29/brief-history-open-data/ (last accessed 18 September 2013). Chopra, S. and Meindl, P. (2012) Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning and Operation, 5th edition. Pearson, Harlow. Christensen, C.M. (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma. Harvard Business Review Press, Cambridge, MA. CIPPIC (2006) On the Data Trail: How Detailed Information About You Gets into the Hands of Organizations With Whom You Have No Relationship.

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research
by Michael Shearn
Published 8 Nov 2011

To ensure a steady source of supply from what was an unreliable source, Nestlé S.A. worked with these small farmers, providing them with tools and advice (e.g., on farming practices, helping them obtain pesticides and fertilizers) to help them create more successful crops. As the production quality from these small farmers improved, this increased the reliable supply of specialized coffee beans for Nestlé.28 Supply Chain Management Supply chain management is the process of matching demand for products with supply. This includes determining the amount of inventory to carry, handling product returns, and distributing products. If you are evaluating a business, such as a fashion or online retailer (e.g., Amazon.com), it is imperative that you learn how it manages its supply chain.

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For example, what if a supplier runs out of product? What does the business do? You can often find articles written about the supply chain of a business or interviews written about supply chain managers in trade journals. For example, here are a few trade publications for operations and logistics management professionals: DC Velocity Commercial Carrier Journal Supply & Demand Chain Executive Supply Chain Digest World Trade Logistics Journal Logistics Today Supply Chain Management Review Logistics Management There are many articles in these publications that have been written about Li & Fung, Toyota, Starbucks, Nike, and Wal-Mart—all of which have strong supply chains.

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See state-owned enterprises Sonkin, Paul sourcesevaluating interview locating of supplies Southwest Airlines balance sheet of speed of growth Spirit Airlines spreadsheet, tracking investments via Stahl, Jack stakeholders, benefitting Staples Starbucks state-owned enterprises (SOE) static ratios Stemberg, Thomas Stericycle sticky accounts stock awards, restricted stock options dilution, offsetting stock options employees managers and stock ownership required salary versus stock returns, employee relations and stock screens, using stock buying back financing acquisitions with management buying or selling transaction motivation strategic plans failure of long-term planning versus setting financial goals Strayer Education structural advantage subscription-type firms, metrics for substitute products, risks from Sun Microsystems Sunbeam suppliers dependence on innovation by relationship with supplies, sources of supply chain management sustainable competitive advantage finding business with structural switching costs synergy Sysco Tan, Seng Hock Taubman, Alfred tax purposes, selling stock for taxes, generally accepted accounting principles versus IRS technology price transparency and Tesco TEV. See total enterprise value theme parks, operating leverage Thiry, Kent Thomas, David Time Warner time, spent learning TJ Maxx Tommy Hilfiger total enterprise value (TEV) track record, manager’s trade associations trade journals Train, John trends, fads versus Tyco Tyler Corporation understanding, of acquired business Unilever University of Phoenix Urban Outfitters US Air UTI Worldwide Valkenaar, Lee valuation, as investment filter value creation, long-term Value Line values, business Van Cleef & Arpels variable costs Choice Hotels identifying Southwest Airlines VCA Antech Veer, Jeroen van de Viagra Volkswagen AG W.P.

Making a Killing: The Deadly Implications of the Counterfeit Drug Trade
by Roger Bate
Published 25 Jun 2008

Securing the supply chain includes making applications for drug wholesaler licenses more rigorous and increasing penalties—and enforcement power to impose these penalties—for counterfeiters. Communication channels among enforcement agencies—which in the United States are the FDA, the DEA, and customs—must also be streamlined. While many developing countries lack the regulatory structures and technical capacity for sophisticated supply-chain management and post-production drug safety POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS 69 schemes, reforms of the FDA and other national drug authorities in developed countries serve as models. Particularly in developed countries, policymakers should work to correct the worrisome asymmetry between the resources expended to ensure the safety of a drug before it is approved for distribution and those used to guarantee its quality after it goes to market.

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Pfizer is one company that is doing this.41 Care must be taken, however, to strike a balance between preserving drug safety and promoting consumer-friendly competition. Purchasing directly from almost all manufacturers will likely add costs to the system—what James C. McAllister, editor of Pharmacy Times, describes as a “definite step backwards in supply chain management.”42 Pharmaceutical companies are also uniquely positioned to provide consultative assistance and the transfer of technology to improve supply chains in low-income nations. They should be prepared to do so for any country that unequivocally defends intellectual property rights. They can only make investments for training and other support in these countries, however, if they are able to tier their prices appropriately.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

Trade finance is safe bet, as it provides a source of revenue that is independent of interest rates, provides cross-border payment fees, and has a low rate of default (up to 10 times lower than for traditional corporate lending (Accenture, 2016)). Together, supply chain management and trade finance provide market players with capital to produce and sell products and services within territories and across borders. However, in recent times, supply chain management and trade finance have come under increased scrutiny, which has resulted in processing delays and additional risks. Institutions are unsatisfied with the current trade finance instruments, as they involve relatively high fees, involve complex procedures, and entail large time delays owing to their dependence on paper documentation.

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What is thus needed by governments is the definition of global standards, so that inventions like Ripple can work hand in hand with societal stakeholders to strengthen the fundamental principles and guide policy-making efforts. At an international scale, what is required is an ICANN-esque equivalent for the Blockchain. Trade Finance Trade is the oldest form of value exchange that human societies have engaged in. Today, the movement of goods across borders is carried out through supply chain management and trade finance. Supply chain deals with the processes that document the flow of goods from producer to consumer. It encompasses a wide range of procedures and structures that govern manufacturing, inventory management, and quality control. This involves a number of intermediaries and the transactions between them have to be documented to ensure the integrity of the trade process.

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Payment protection insurance (PPI) Peer-to-peer (P2P) Personal identification number (PIN) Polycoin Popperian falsifiability Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) Public-key certificate (PKC) Public-key infrastructure (PKI) Q Quantitative easing (QE) Quantitative model R R3 CORDA™ Rational expectations Rational expectations structural models Rational expectations theory (RET) Rational expectations theory (RMT) RBCmodels SeeReal Business Cycle (RBC) models Reaganomics Real Business Cycle (RBC) models Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system Regular laws Ripple protocol S Santa Fe artificial stock market model Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) Scalability SecureKey Concierge Seigniorage Shadow banking and systemic risk commercial banks definition dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models economic flexibility EMH and RET financial markets and monetary policy growth of financial products macroeconomic theories non-bank channels securitization trades Sharding Blockchain FinTech transformation global Fintech financing activity private sector ShoCard SIGEmodels SeeSticky Information General Equilibrium (SIGE) models Skill-biased technological change (SBTC) SkuChain Software as a service (SaaS) Sticky Information General Equilibrium (SIGE) models SWIFT network Systemically important financial institutions (SIFI) System identification number (SIN) T Tax evasion Tech-led firms Technology and invention accelerating consilience of technology blockchain combinatorial evolution complexity EDVAC equilibrium and rational expectations Konratiev waves Moore’s law and Wright’s law Popperian scientific method punch cards socialization specialised operations technological change Technology and invention socialization and complexity specialisation, diversity and ubiquity The Chicago Plan advantages benefits commercial banks debt feature existing debt fractional banking system monetary policies money principles and assumptions reduce private and public debt levels zero bound problem Too Big to Fail (TBTF) Bandits’ Club banking innovations CDS market derivative instruments endingTBTF approaches banking industry Dodd Frank Act goals and implementations innovative process Kashkari, Neel Living Will Review process optimal level questions systemically important financial institutions financial history fragmentation Gramm-Leach-Bliley financial modernization act ideological kidnapping macroeconomic models McFadden Act PPI process of technological innovations Trade finance automation banks and clients Blockchain capitalistic markets financial institutions limitations R3 CORDA™ regulators and policy makers supply chain management SWIFT network Wilson, Lamar Traditional structural models Tradle Transactional cost theory (TCT) Trunomi TUPAS U Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) acts Universal Basic Income (UBI) U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) US telecoms industry V Varoufakis, Yanis Vector auto regression (VAR) models W, X, Y, Z Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI) Wilson, Lamar

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

They may use data to guide their thinking, but they are just as likely to fall prey to a long list of self-delusions—everything from a sunk-cost bias to a confirmation bias (see below for a list of cognitive biases). One reason for Google’s success is that it is more ruthlessly data-driven than most other companies, right down to its hiring practices. In the same way that today we can no longer handle the complexities of air traffic control or supply chain management without algorithms, almost all the business insights and decisions of tomorrow will be data-driven. An analysis by the American Psychological Association of seventeen studies on hiring practices found that a simple algorithm beat intuitive hiring practices by more than 25 percent in terms of successful hires.

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Remove anyone who puts his or her own career ahead of the success of the enterprise. 2. Partner with, Invest in or Acquire ExOs From 1990 to about 2005, there were at least five major disruptions in the retail or CPG industry. Three of them—EPOS systems with point-of-sale transactions, RFID tags for supply chain management, and customer loyalty cards—produced a significant amount of new data that fundamentally changed the industry. Marcus Shingles, a principal at Deloitte Consulting, and his research team spent most of 2012 helping the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association (GMA) analyze the CPG industry for potential Big Data innovation disruptions of the same magnitude.

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Founded in June 2010 and focused on low-end Android smartphones, the company sold twenty million handsets in 2013, recording annual revenues of more than $5 billion. Lei Jun, one of the founders, is seen as a Chinese Steve Jobs. That’s not just because he’s been heavily inspired by Apple’s design, marketing and supply chain management, but also because of Xiaomi’s intense focus on performance, quality and customer experience—characteristics that Lei Jun wants to make available to everyone at affordable prices. Xiaomi offers a curated Apple smartphone experience with the software development, speed and processes of Google Android, all at a low price.

Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future
by Richard Susskind
Published 10 Jan 2013

This is similar in many ways to the role of the production manager in a manufacturing environment. The discipline of legal project management should, in my view, be built upon theory and experience from related management disciplines, such as logistics and supply-chain management. No doubt, the legal sector will come to develop its own sophisticated tools and techniques, such as ‘legal supply-chain management’ and ‘legal logistics’, which will be core subjects in future courses on legal project management. The ODR Practitioner With the advent of online dispute resolution (ODR—see Chapter 10) as a common mechanism for the settling of disagreements, there will be call for practitioners in this emerging field.

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload
by Cal Newport
Published 2 Mar 2021

As you watch these fan videos, you’ll encounter many intensely complex, custom-built variations. One such video replaces the doing column with a ready column divided into three sub-columns: cold, warm, and hot—allowing a more nuanced take on the status of pending tasks.7 Another video, recorded by a professor who teaches supply chain management, demonstrates a personal board format so complicated that it seems to require graduate training in supply chain management to even understand. He divides his options column into color-coded rows that he calls “value streams,” each dedicated to a different type of task and featuring Post-it notes of a matching color. These rows are further divided into internal columns.

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His done column maintains the same color-coded value stream rows as his doing column, allowing him, at a quick glance, to get a sense of how he has recently been allocating his time.8 * * * — The success of Personal Kanban among productivity aficionados underscores an important reality for anyone looking to escape the hyperactive hive mind: task boards are not just effective for coordinating work among teams, but can be incredibly effective in making sense of your individual obligations—even if you don’t have graduate-level training in supply chain management. As I mentioned briefly before, I’ve embraced this idea in my own professional life as a professor, where I use Trello boards to keep track of my obligations during my time as the director of graduate studies (DGS) for the computer science department at Georgetown. Following Jim Benson’s basic structure, I have doing and done columns.

Using Open Source Platforms for Business Intelligence: Avoid Pitfalls and Maximize Roi
by Lyndsay Wise
Published 16 Sep 2012

Once we understand its value independently, we can look at how the OS market has shifted some of the available offerings and the general expectations of organizations. An introduction to BI Overall, the software industry provides a broad range of solutions to meet the needs of companies, ranging from transactional and supply chain management to customer relationship management (CRM) and project planning. Organizations apply a wide variety of software throughout their companies to manage their daily operations. Unfortunately, many of these solutions are implemented independently of one another and use different infrastructures that do not easily integrate with one another.

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Within these categories, BI represents one area of OS. Looking at OS more broadly means identifying the fact that most, if not all, software has OS options. BI is not a new player in this arena. In fact, developers have been able to adopt OS solutions on a broad scale to include CRM, ERP, supply chain management, database development, etc. For some organizations this means having IT development teams design and deploy a wide range of OS solutions that are now passed off as homegrown business applications. One of the benefits of this approach remains that many OS offerings partner with one another to provide overall business-driven applications versus a best of breed or piecemeal approach.

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Obviously, the perceived benefits are different depending on the goal of the BI project. In some cases, individualized projects may require a lot of customization anyway, meaning that companies will lean towards free software with broader development efforts. On the other hand, more traditional applications, such as sales and marketing dashboards, retail analysis, or supply chain management, are sure bets with out-of-thebox offerings. Business and technical requirements The past two chapters have broken down the factors on both business and technical levels, after providing an overview of both commercial and community options. In addition to the types of OSBI models and the factors that contribute to their selection, companies are tasked with identifying which model if any will suit the organization’s business challenges.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

This technology has the following traits: It does not involve robots, contrary to its name; It makes use of workflow and business rules technology; It is easily configured and modified by business users; It deals with highly repetitive and transactional tasks; It doesn’t learn or improve its performance without human modification; It typically interfaces with multiple information systems as if it were a human user; this is called “presentation layer” integration. Examples of settings in which this technology is popular include banking (for example, for back-office customer service tasks, such as replacing a lost ATM card), insurance (processing claims and payments), IT (monitoring system error messages and fixing simple problems), and supply chain management (processing invoices and responding to routine requests from customers and suppliers). There are substantial benefits from this type of automation, even though it is one of the less exotic forms of intelligent technology. Case studies compiled by process automation vendor Automation Anywhere suggest that 30 to 40 percent reductions in the cost and time to perform a process are not atypical.

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The goal of the program was to create a new generation of leaders to revitalize American manufacturing; it addressed technical, managerial, and organizational perspectives on the field. Lawton then also got an MBA from MIT. He then worked at Hewlett-Packard in manufacturing, and at several startups in e-commerce and supply chain management. He’s still trying to revitalize manufacturing and feels strongly that Baxter and Sawyer, working closely with humans, can help in the effort. Marketers —Marketing is a particularly important function with automated systems and cognitive technologies, primarily because many people don’t understand them, and many of those who do are worried about them.

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Dru, 160 Levy, Frank, 27, 63 Linton, Mike, 105 Lippershey, Hans, 59 Lloyd’s of London, 79, 221 López de Mántaras, Ramón, 54–55 Losey, Ralph, 132, 142–43, 145, 146 Lowell, Francis Cabot, 133 Luddite fallacy, 1 Luma Partners, 100 Lyman, Henry, 133 machine learning, 21, 37, 178 ensemble methods, 72 Malone, Mike, 6–7 Manjoo, Farhad, 41 manufacturing, 1, 2, 54 supply chain management, 48 textile industry, 132–33 marketing, 93 automated, 121–22, 128, 151, 183 balancing computer-based and human skills, 105 content marketing, 121–22 digital, 101–2 LUMAscapes, 100 Stepping Forward in, 183–85 by Zipcar, 101–2, 195 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Leaders for Manufacturing, 183 Media Lab, 235 Mayer, John, 113, 114, 116 McAfee, Andy, 6, 8, 27, 74 McDonough, Ryan, 116–17 McDonough, Will, 117 McGraw-Hill Education (MHE), 20, 86 McKinsey, 165 Global Institute report, 5 MD Anderson Cancer Center, 53, 209–10, 155, 215 medicine.

Quality Investing: Owning the Best Companies for the Long Term
by Torkell T. Eide , Lawrence A. Cunningham and Patrick Hargreaves
Published 5 Jan 2016

Also designed to bring order to credit markets, the industry’s stability and related barriers to entry are illustrated by the fact that it survived, basically intact, despite considerable rating errors in the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008. Such independent verification or testing services operate in many settings, such as financial auditing, supply chain management, and consumer product reviews. They offer particular value when risks of error are high, both from the direct consequences of failure – such as misallocated capital or injuries – and from the second-order effects of harm to reputation or legal liability. Such services may have even greater value when used by third-parties rather than the payer, as with both bond rating agencies and financial auditing.

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Scale is essential. Success entails obtaining thousands of inputs from around the world coordinated in a complex fashion, at considerable cost. The model depends on continuous and rapid response to shifting demand, meaning understanding changing consumer preferences, having control of the supply chain, managing inventory effectively, and deftness in distribution. All this requires good designers, operation mavens, and synchronized information technology. Upstarts will struggle to do it all well. True, as technology and supply chain automation commoditizes, these business models may become more vulnerable.

The Fissured Workplace
by David Weil
Published 17 Feb 2014

Sourcing production to its Monterrey facility and to other international suppliers would give Hershey “increased access to borderless sourcing [and] … further leverage the company’s manufacturing scale within a lower overall cost structure.”53 Hershey investors thought well of the strategy, as reflected in the company’s stock price, which outperformed the market consistently over the same period.54 By 2009 Lenny had successfully outsourced most of the production outlined in the strategy, closed six facilities in the United States and Canada, and let go an estimated 3,000 union workers. Hershey further upgraded its supply chain management system, moving cocoa beans, semiprocessed chocolate bars, and other ingredients to be made outside of the United States and Canada and reassembled and packaged by Hershey in a small number of U.S. facilities, where they could then be shipped from subcontracted distribution operations like those in Palmyra.

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Even where work has traditionally been done by other suppliers, the need for greater coordination has increased as products have become more complex, quality standards more demanding, time-to-market demands tighter, and management of inventories more critical. In retailing, information technologies have also transformed arm’s-length supplier relationships, allowing retailers to manage an ever-growing scope of products while substantially reducing their exposure to inventory risk. Consequently, supply chain management results in the pressures that create fissured workplaces and their often deleterious impacts on the people working within them. This chapter focuses on supply chains as a form of fissured employment. The chapter starts by looking at how the core of supply chain operations—logistics—has been changed in distribution centers.

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But in most cases to date, the FedEx position has been upheld: FedEx, as a branded, logistics juggernaut for which time to delivery is central to customer value, need not directly employ the workforce central to that mission. FedEx is not alone in its use of fissured workplace arrangements for logistics, the centerpiece of modern supply chains. More and more distribution centers are adopting an organizational form where third-party management has been married to subcontracting. Since supply chain management has elements that create many of the preconditions of the fissured workplace, the increasing use of subcontracting and temporary staffing companies within logistics can be considered fissuring on top of fissuring—fissuring squared. Lean Retailing and the Modern Distribution Center Like lean manufacturing, lean retailing takes advantage of information technologies, automation, industry standards, and management innovations to align orders from suppliers more closely with what consumers are buying in the store (rather than what purchasing agents, months in advance, think consumers might buy).

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

Because supply chains link diverse players across vast distances who may not have any trusted personal relationships among them, they impose what managers call “one version of the truth,” the need for real-time and accurate data sharing so that everyone in the network can know where all things are at all times.14 Walmart’s CEO, Douglas McMillon, has said he runs a “tech company,” one that perpetually communicates sales and stock volume data digitally with suppliers like Procter & Gamble. Unilever constantly reads local demand conditions and taps into its global production system to more flexibly deliver goods across its markets. M.B.A. programs now consider supply chain management a core competency due to its high demand by employers in retail, defense, information technology (IT), and other sectors.15 Outside the boardroom, the movements of ordinary people in search of a better life are the best evidence that we have entered a supply chain world. In 1960, only 73 million people lived outside their country of origin; today the number of expatriates is 300 million and growing rapidly since the financial crisis.

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Where such progressive evolution has not occurred, labor strikes have forced huge write-downs onto the balance sheets of mining and manufacturing companies, teaching them that caring for the supply chain and everyone along it is a sound long-term investment. The more supply chain interdependencies expand, the more true corporate citizenship emerges.*2 The paradox of the growing power of corporations is that even as their autonomy grows, their role as service providers does as well. Supply chain management has thus become a board-level issue, but expanding supply chain reach is viewed as a paradigm-shifting opportunity. Logistics operators such as Li & Fung and the largest retail conglomerates such as Unilever have modified their business models and delivery mechanisms to target the billions of people at the “bottom of the pyramid.”

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John Gattorna, author of Dynamic Supply Chains, believes the very concept of supply chains should be renamed “value networks” for the widespread benefits they bring, such as adapting essential products to the price points of local markets, building infrastructure that benefits small businesses, and training and educating local workers. Stanford Business School’s Value Chain Innovation Initiative manages a growing library around the social, environmental, and other positive impacts of modifying supply chain management. *2 As the reputation-building guru Simon Anholt explains, companies initially sign up for corporate social responsibility projects for cynical reasons—buttressing their image—but eventually they realize that doing good is how to improve their image. Anholt calls this the “loophole in human nature

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Published 5 Mar 2019

Thus, planning, and above all trust, openness and cooperation along the supply chain—rather than competition—are fundamental to continuous replacement. This is not the “kumbaya” analysis of two socialist writers; even the most hard-hearted commerce researchers and company directors argue that a prerequisite of successful supply chain management is that all participants in the chain recognize that they all will gain more by cooperating as a trusting, information-sharing whole than they will as competitors. The seller, for example, is in effect telling the buyer how much he will buy. The retailer has to trust the supplier with restocking decisions.

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The same phenomenon occurs in retail as much as it does manufacturing (and manufacturing is merely another link within the retail supply chain anyway), with Toyota being one of the first firms to implement intra- and inter-firm information visibility through its Walmart-like “Kanban” system, although the origin of this strategy dates as far back as the 1940s. While Walmart was pivotal in development of supply chain management, there are few large companies that have not copied its practices via some form of cross–supply chain visibility and planning, extending the planning that happens within a firm very widely throughout the capitalist “marketplace.” Nevertheless, Walmart may just be the most dedicated follower of this “firmification” of supply chains.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 27 Sep 2011

If the global economy is to transition successfully into a Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure, entrepreneurs and managers will need to be educated to take advantage of all the cutting edge business models, including open-source and networked commerce, distributed and collaborative research and development strategies, and sustainable low-carbon logistics and supply chain management. SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP The collaborative nature of the new economy is fundamentally at odds with classical economic theory, which puts great store on the assumption that individual self-interest in the marketplace is the only effective way to drive economic growth. The Third Industrial Revolution model also eschews the kind of centralized command and control associated with traditional Soviet-style socialist economies.

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(Arnold Toynbee, the acclaimed British historian, first popularized the concept of the “Industrial Revolution” in a series of lectures he delivered in the late 1880s, well after the First Industrial Revolution was underway.39) Today, we are witnessing the convergence of a new communications media and energy regime—a Third Industrial Revolution. Businesses across widely divergent fields—clean energies, green construction, telecommunications, micro-generation, distributed grid IT, plug-in electric and fuel cell transport, sustainable chemistry, nanotechnology, zero-carbon logistics and supply-chain management, and so on—are developing an array of new technologies, products, and services. Until recently, these new commercial opportunities have attracted only modest interest in the investment community and with the public at large. That’s because we human beings live by stories, and stories are always about the relationships and interactions between characters.

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Yellen, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, took note of the trend, pointing out that the GDP remained unchanged in the four quarters of 2009, but payrolls declined by 4 percent. In other words, companies increased their output per worker by 4 percent.3 New efficiencies in supply chain management accounted for much of this increase in productivity. Nowhere is the disconnect between productivity gains and job losses greater than in manufacturing. In the period between 1995 and 2002, more than thirty-one million manufacturing jobs disappeared in the twenty largest economies, while productivity rose by 4.3 percent and global industrial production increased by 30 percent.4 The reality is that manufacturers can produce more goods with fewer workers.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

Smart shelf technology: “The Future of Retail: Shopping and the Smart Shelf,” Intel. See: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/retail/digital-retail-futurecasting-report.html. Back in 2015, a Cisco study found that IoT solutions: Andrew Meola, “How IoT Logistics Will Revolutionize Supply Chain Management,” Business Insider, December 21, 2016. See: https://www.businessinsider.com/internet-of-things-logistics-supply-chain-management-2016-10. The Robots Are Coming, The Robots Are Coming The Robots Are Coming, The Robots Are Coming: Daniel Faggella, “Artificial Intelligence In Retail—10 Present and Future Use Cases,” Emerj.com, March 28, 2019. See: https://emerj.com/ai-sector-overviews/artificial-intelligence-retail/.

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The innovation deters theft, automates restocking, and ensures that inventory is always in the right spot. Today, Intel’s version has a screen built into the shelf. Tomorrow, smart shelves will be AI-enhanced and capable of conversation. Is the sweater you’re holding dry clean only? Just ask the shelf. Perhaps the biggest shift in retail will be one of efficiency, especially in supply chain management. Back in 2015, a Cisco study found that IoT solutions will have more than a $1.9 trillion impact on this sector, and for good reason. AI can detect patterns in data that humans cannot. This means that every link in the supply chain—inventory levels, supplier quality, demand forecasting, production planning, transportation management, and more—is being revolutionized.

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket
by Benjamin Lorr
Published 14 Jun 2020

Over 35 million people per year work under coercion: “Profits and Poverty: The Economics of Forced Labour,” International Labour Office, 2014. labor is responsible for some $150 billion in profits: Ibid. Sex slaves . . . less than a quarter: Stefan Gold, Alexander Trautrim, and Zoe Trodd, “Modern slavery challenges to supply chain management,” Supply Chain Management 20 (2015). what they called a “strategic vetting process”: The following depiction of the Humanity United process was compiled with help from Lori Bishop, Brian Edge, Katrina Nakamura. the Guardian leverage the Humanity United report to publish their own massive exposé: Kate Hodal, Chris Kelly, and Felicity Lawrence, “Revealed: Asian Slave Labor Producing Prawns for Supermarkets in US, UK,” The Guardian, June 10, 2014.

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In the next audit, it needs to be 32 inches”—that was eventually resolved by hiring a former auditor as a consultant who recommended the factory “install two hooks and rotate the extinguisher back-and-forth.” Your private sector at work! Sonali Rammohan, “Toward a More Responsible Supply Chain: The HP Story,” Supply Chain Management Review, July 2009; Genevieve LeBaron, Jane Lister, and Peter Dauvergne, “Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability Through the Ethical Audit Regime,” Globalizations 14, no. 6 (2017). A date is set. Inspection questions previewed: As hinted in the text, the conflicts of interest here are truly impressive.

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss
by Ron Adner
Published 1 Mar 2012

But as these innovation strategies diffused more broadly across organizations, their mastery stopped being a source of differentiation and became, instead, simply an operational requirement for getting in the game. Today we are witnessing another transition point. The enormous benefits that accrued to firms who mastered supply chain management—global procurement, just-in-time-production, lean inventory management—are still real, but they are now widely shared. In industry after industry, we see a major change taking place as firms shift from using supply chains to offer better products to embracing partnerships and collaboration to offer better “solutions.”

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See Sony Reader portable music players, 140–42 3-D TV, 53 Sony Discman, 142 Sony Pressman, 141 Sony Reader, 90–95 and Connect.com, 90, 93 Data Discman Reader, 88–89 failure, reasons for, 3, 93–95, 99–100, 178 features of, 90–91 in Japan, failure of, 90 versus Kindle, 96–97, 99–100 value blueprint, 91–95 value proposition, 90–91 Sony Walkman, early-mover advantage, 140–41 Sortais, Thierry, 17 Spectrum rights, 41, 42 Staged expansion, 199–205 goals of, 194 iPhone, 216–17 iPod, 208–10 M-PESA, 199–205 Stringer, Sir Howard, 90 Superabrasive grinding wheels, 59–61 benefits of, 59–60 costs versus benefits problem, 60–61 Suppliers supply chain, managing, 8–9 supply chain focus, 84 in value blueprint, 85 T Tachikawa, Keiji, 41 Technology innovations ecosystem, necessity of, 52 timing as crucial, 147, 154–56 See also specific areas/products Telecine scanner, 67 Television HDTV, Philips failure, 3, 53 3-D, 53 Tesla Roadster, 170 Thomsen, Mads Krogsgaard, 107 3-D technology films, 74, 76 television, 53 3G mobile technology capabilities of, 40–42 co-innovation needs, 42 corporate expectations, 41–42 execution risk, 45–46 handsets, complexity of, 42–43 market, beginning of, 52 network, first, 41 Nokia 3G phone failure, 42–46, 52–53 spectrum rights, 41, 42 Timing and adoption chain risk, 77 Apple success, 144–45, 147, 208–9, 211 blind spot, 140 and co-innovation, 51, 53–54 and early movers, 140–55 ecosystem construction sequence, 193–223 payback and leadership, 117, 136 smart timing, elements of, 155–57 and technology products, 147, 154–56 Tires, automobile markets for, 25–26 run-flat.

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2
by Thomas A. Limoncelli , Strata R. Chalup and Christina J. Hogan
Published 27 Aug 2014

Rather than meeting individually with customers to understand future capacity requirements, their forecasts can be collected via a web user interface or an API. For example, if you provide a service to hundreds of other teams, forecasting can be become a full-time job for a project manager; alternatively, it can be very little work with proper automation that integrates with the company’s supply-chain management system. • Evaluating new technology can be labor intensive, but if a common case is identified, the end-to-end process can be turned into an assembly-line process and optimized. For example, if hard drives are purchased by the thousand, it is wise to add a new model to the mix only periodically and only after a thorough evaluation.

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Find ways to streamline the actual rack and burn-in. • Manage your time. Make it a priority to install new equipment the moment it arrives. Have no idle hardware. Alternatively, dedicate staff to doing this. Hire non-system administrators (“technicians”) to unbox and rack mount systems. • Work with vendors (supply chain management) to reduce ordering time. • Place many smaller orders rather than one huge order. This improves parallelism of the system. Vendors may be able to chop up one big order into periodic deliveries and monthly billing. A transition from one huge order every 6 months to 6 monthly orders and deliveries may have billing, capital cost, and labor benefits

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A metric uses that data to measure a quantifiable component of performance. This is the stuff of Chapters 16, 17, and 19. • Capacity Planning (CP): Determining future resource needs. Capacity planning involves the technical work of understanding how many resources are needed per unit of growth, plus non-technical aspects such as budgeting, forecasting, and supply chain management. This is the stuff of Chapter 18. • Change Management (CM): Managing how services are purposefully changed over time. This includes the service delivery platform and how it is used to create, deliver, and push into production new application and infrastructure software. This includes firmware upgrades, network changes, and OS configuration management

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
by Larry Bossidy
Published 10 Nov 2009

Determining that some of an organization’s high performers can’t handle the challenges of a new strategic future is a difficult social process—who wants to tell good people they aren’t capable of moving to the next level? But it has to be done, and the kind of people process we are describing forces leaders to put these questions on the table. Linking people, strategy, and operations also helps distill organizational challenges for the coming year. XYZ needs to improve supply-chain management, a crucial skill when selling services to an installed base. Besides new talent, this will require elevating aftermarket to a P&L center reporting directly to the president, so that it will have the focus and accountability it needs. Strategy Become the premier global provider of XYZ systems to a multiple class of customers.

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As one example, let’s look at Susan James, a marketing vice president who was identified as a high-potential person in the Leadership Assessment Summary. Her 2001 performance highlights included developing both the aftermarket strategy for the new solutions-selling environment, and the marketing and profit-improvement strategy for the European market. Her 2002 challenges include continued execution of the aftermarket strategy, especially supply chain management. While she’s customer focused and knows the industry and its products, she still has important development needs. She has to work on building teams through coaching, and she has to move to upgrade the skills of weak performers, especially those serving the European market. Since there will be significant new hiring for the solutions-selling program, she has to make sure she effectively integrates new people.

The Future Is Asian
by Parag Khanna
Published 5 Feb 2019

The overflowing street-side cafés of Lahore and Karachi represent the onset of what the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid describes as “infinite demand.” E-commerce is also growing along with 4G and broadband connectivity. Alibaba launched a national AliExpress.com shopping site for Pakistan in 2017. The Hong Kong–based global supply chain manager Li & Fung is a superb proxy for South Asia’s thriving logistics and retail sectors. In the words of the company’s CFO, Spencer Fung, the company’s size makes it a “bowling ball amidst grains of sand.” As Li & Fung shifts from simple wage arbitrage (cost optimization) toward geographic arbitrage (speed optimization), it is becoming ever more a global company first and a Chinese company second.

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Rajendra Pawar, a cofounder of India’s private education powerhouse NIIT, has scaled his on-site and online industry-linked skills programs to reach 500,000 students per year, training them on demand for Indian and global companies from oil rigs to tech parks, with curricular offerings expanding to service insurance, supply-chain management, programming, and other sectors. After completing one assignment, a student can return to be retrained for the next one. Hence NIIT’s motto, which embodies the spirit of lifelong learning: “Anadi Anant” (Without beginning, without end). East Asians are doing the best at preparing youth for an uncertain professional landscape.

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The growing adoption of 3D printing for designing and producing auto components, medical devices, and various consumer products on a large scale might replace large volumes of goods mass-manufactured in Asia and reimported to the United States and Europe. But since most such goods are sold in Asia anyway, more and more companies are positioning these technologies as much abroad as at home. The San Francisco–based Flex (formerly Flextronics), one of the world’s largest and most technologically sophisticated supply-chain managers, is deploying advanced design and tailored manufacturing solutions for clients ranging from Cisco Systems to Nike—especially in Asia, where the customers are. Not only are Americans selling in Asia, but their travel as professionals and tourists to Asia helps US companies as well. As Asian consumption of entertainment surges, American pop singers, rock bands, and sports teams spend weeks touring Asia, selling out stadiums.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

These criminal enterprises go to great lengths to ensure their sustainability and as such are almost exclusively located in jurisdictional safe havens, places with weak governments, unstable political regimes, and police forces willing to look the other way, for a fee of course. Within these criminal syndicates, there are divisions of labor, supply chain management, department heads, outside consultants, and team deliverables. To understand the power and professionalism of Crime, Inc., we must first and foremost take a look at its org chart in order to deconstruct the modern criminal organization. Here are the most common roles and responsibilities based on undercover research: CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER The CEO of any criminal enterprise is responsible for decision making and overseeing operations.

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ATTORNEY FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK Whether organized cyber-crime groups structure themselves along the lines of corporations, such as Innovative Marketing, or more nimble self-assembling swarms, one thing is clear: they are deeply sophisticated in their approach to business and their “customers.” They have appropriated the latest legitimate corporate strategies and are well versed in supply chain management, global logistics, creative financing, just-in-time manufacturing, workforce incentivization, and consumer needs analysis. The result is the modern cyber-crime enterprise, a full-service, multiproduct, highly profitable global organization capable of taking down any individual, company, or government at will.

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…‘If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost.’ ” Ashton’s concept was both simple and powerful and had a major impact on manufacturers and retailers like Walmart, dramatically improving their supply chain management and cutting costs for consumers. Back in 1999, however, the technology did not exist to make the IoT a reality outside very controlled environments, such as factory warehouses. Today that has changed, and a confluence of developments has come together to enable major leaps forward in the world of ubiquitous computing, allowing for the first time the widespread “embedding of miniature computers in objects and connecting them to the Internet using wireless technology.”

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry
by Peter Warren Singer
Published 1 Jan 2003

Yet, the firms that offered these services would be defined as passive, simply because their employees were unarmed and too high-level to be wasted on the battlefield. This division also counterintuitively lumps firms that offer military officers for hire or provide training in offensive military doctrine along with those that offer logistics or supply-chain management. The services obviously differ, but the passive/active distinction does not recognize why. The final problem is that the active/passive, private security/militarv monikers are really normative determinations within an economically mo- tivated setting. For good reason, no other industry classifies its sectors this way, as the categorization typically degenerates into a biased way of distinguishing the "good" passive/private security firms from the "bad" active/ private military firms.

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MILITARY SUPPORT FIRMS Firms that provide supplementary military sendees characterize the third sector of the industry. These privatized functions, include nonlethal aid and assistance, including logistics, intelligence, technical support supply, and transportation. As with what has occurred with supply-chain management in general industry, the benefit of this type of military outsourcing is that these firms specialize in secondary tasks not part of the overall core mission of the client. Thus, they are able to build capabilities and efficiencies that a client military cannot sustain. The client's own military, in turn, can concentrate on its primary business of fighting.

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BRS augmented U.S. forces in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and most recently secured a $1 billion dollar contract in support of KFOR in Kosovo.33 This last figure illustrates that firm revenue tend to grow in size as one moves up the industry typology. Other military support sector firms include Boeing Services, Holmes, and Narver. Parallels of general support sector firms include companies such as Marriott-Sodexho that offers institutional facilities management and, of course, general supply-chain management firms that many military support sector firms are modeled after. The military's core task is generally perceived as combat, so it is far from surprising that the primary areas for support sector firms has been in the more mundane combat support sectors. Although it was once seen as unsuitable for privatization, the military logistics role—transporting and supplying the troops on the battlefield—has been notable for the extent of this sort of privatization.

The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance From Scratch
by Thomas Thwaites
Published 27 Sep 2011

I’m still hopeful that I’ll see some toast when I up the voltage, or use white bread instead of the whole wheat I’ve tried so far. Toast. Has that really been my goal for the last nine months? In one way, yes. But in another more accurate way, no. I wanted to get under the skin of the slick-looking objects that surround us, but don’t really come from anywhere (unless you work in supply chain management). To the average consumer (like me) a toaster begins its life on display in a shop, waiting for you or someone to buy it. To pay £3.94 for a toaster that’s “from a shop” seems vaguely reasonable, but £3.94 for a toaster that is entirely made from stuff that a few months ago was rocks and sludge distributed in giant holes all over the world, then brought together in an elaborate series of processes and exchanges, gradually assembled by many people, wrapped, and boxed and then somehow shipped to that shop, which is heated and lit and has people being paid to assist you in your purchase: Somehow £3.94 for all of this doesn’t seem to quite add up.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
by John Hagel Iii and John Seely Brown
Published 12 Apr 2010

Founded in 1972, it had, by 1996, more than 9,000 of its enterprise software systems installed at companies around the world.18 These big systems had one application each to keep track of financial, accounting, customer, materials, and other information and to help with reporting, planning, and forecasting in areas such as finance, marketing, supply-chain management, and other important functions. Unfortunately, as the applications flourished and multiplied, each came to have its own database, making it difficult to search across applications to find, for example, all the information that might be needed pertaining to a particular customer. The rise of the Internet—and the advent of new ways of organizing software, called service-oriented architectures (SOAs)—posed an opportunity for SAP.

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The challenge for institutional leaders is how to embrace and broaden the application of these edge technologies without, at least initially, directly challenging the core technology platforms of the firm. One of the most promising opportunities for applying these new social-media technologies in the near term lies in the area of exception handling. It turns out that a substantial portion of employee time in supply-chain management, sales, and customer service is devoted to handling exceptions that the automated enterprise IT platforms cannot process. We’re not talking about, for example, entering an address with the numbers transposed in a ZIP code. We’re talking about a broad range of situations where the needs of the participants fall outside of currently defined policies and protocols even if no “error” has occurred.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

Firms can invest in intangible capital; indeed, when technology is changing rapidly they must: new technologies create the possibility of doing things far more effectively, but to take advantage of that possibility the firm must learn new ways of doing things. The time required to build that intangible capital accounts for part of the delay we observe between the arrival of a powerful new technology – such as supply-chain management software – and the productivity dividend that technology eventually generates. To use the software well firms needed to hire new workers with complementary skills. They needed to invest in equipment, including computers and scanners, to track inventory. They needed to bring suppliers into the system and train all the workers involved on how to use the new software.

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Ray labour abundance as good problem bargaining power cognitive but repetitive collective bargaining and demographic issues discrimination and exclusion global growth of workforce and immigration liberalization in 1970s/80s ‘lump of labour’ fallacy occupational licences organized and proximity reallocation to growing industries retraining and skill acquisition and scarcity and social value work as a positive good see also employment Labour Party, British land scarcity Latvia Le Pen, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine legal profession Lehman Brothers collapse (2008) Lepore, Jill liberalization, economic (from 1970s) Linkner, Josh, The Road to Reinvention London Lucas, Robert Lyft maker-taker distinction Malthus, Reverend Thomas Manchester Mandel, Michael Mankiw, Gregory marketing and public relations Marshall, Alfred Marx, Karl Mason, Paul, Postcapitalism (2015) McAfee, Andrew medicine and healthcare ‘mercantilist’ world Mercedes Benz Mexico Microsoft mineral industries minimum wage Mokyr, Joel Monroe, President James MOOCs (‘massive open online courses’) Moore, Gordon mortality rates Mosaic (web browser) music, digital nation states big communities of affinity inequality between as loci of redistribution and social capital nationalist and separatist movements Netherlands Netscape New York City Newsweek NIMBYism Nordic and Scandinavian economies North Carolina North Dakota Obama, Barack oil markets O’Neill, Jim Oracle Orbán, Viktor outsourcing Peretti, Jonah Peterson Institute for International Economics pets.com Philadelphia Centennial Fair (1876) Philippines Phoenix, Arizona Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) Poland political institutions politics fractionalization in Europe future/emerging narratives geopolitical forces human wealth narrative left-wing looming upheaval/conflict Marxism nationalist and separatist movements past unrest and conflict polarization in USA radicalism and extremism realignment revolutionary right-wing rise of populist outsiders and scarcity social membership battles Poor Laws, British print media advertising revenue productivity agricultural artisanal goods and services Baumol’s Cost Disease and cities and dematerialization and digital revolution and employment trilemma and financial crisis (2008) and Henry Ford growth data in higher education of highly skilled few and industrial revolution minimum wage impact paradox of in service sector and specialization and wage rates see also factors of production professional, technical or managerial work and education levels and emerging economies the highly skilled few and industrial revolution and ‘offshoring’ professional associations skilled cities professional associations profits Progressive Policy Institute property values proximity public spending Putnam, Robert Quakebot quantitative easing Race Against the Machine, Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2011) railways Raleigh, North Carolina Reagan, Ronald redistribution and geopolitical forces during liberal era methods of nation state as locus of as a necessity as politically hard and societal openness wealth as human rent, economic Republican Party, US ‘reshoring’ phenomenon Resseger, Matthew retail sector retirement age Ricardo, David rich people and maker-taker distinction wild contingency of wealth Robinson, James robots Rodrik, Dani Romney, Mitt rule of law Russia San Francisco San Jose Sanders, Bernie sanitation SAP Saudi Arabia savings glut, global ‘Say’s Law’ Scalia, Antonin Scandinavian and Nordic economies scarcity and labour political effects of Schleicher, David Schwartz, Anna scientists Scotland Sears Second World War secular stagnation global spread of possible solutions shale deposits sharing economies Silicon Valley Singapore skilled workers and education levels and falling wages the highly skilled few and industrial revolution ‘knowledge-intensive’ goods and services reshoring phenomenon technological deskilling see also professional, technical or managerial work Slack (chat service) Slate (web publication) smartphone culture Smith, Adam social capital and American Constitution baseball metaphor and cities ‘deepening’ definition/nature of and dematerialization and developing economies and erosion of institutions of firms and companies and good government and housing wealth and immigration and income distribution during industrial revolution and liberalization and nation-states productive application of and rich-poor nation gap and Adam Smith and start-ups social class conflict middle classes and NIMBYism social conditioning of labour force working classes social democratic model social reform social wealth and social membership software ‘enterprise software’ products supply-chain management Solow, Robert Somalia South Korea Soviet Union, dissolution of (1991) specialization Star Trek state, role of steam power Subramanian, Arvind suburbanization Sweden Syriza party Taiwan TaskRabbit taxation telegraphy Tesla, Nikola Thatcher, Margaret ‘tiger’ economies of South-East Asia Time Warner Toyota trade China as ‘mega-trader’ ‘comparative advantage’ theory and dematerialization global supply chains liberalization shaping of by digital revolution Adam Smith on trade unions transhumanism transport technology self-driving cars Trump, Donald Twitter Uber UK Independence Party United States of America (USA) 2016 Presidential election campaign average income Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) Constitution deindustrialization education in employment in ethno-nationalist diversity of financial crisis (2008) housing costs in housing wealth in individualism in industrialization in inequality in Jim Crow segregation labour scarcity in Young America liberalization in minimum wage in political polarization in post-crisis profit rates productivity boom of 1990s real wage data rising debt levels secular stagnation in shale revolution in social capital in and social wealth surpasses Britain as leading nation wage subsidies in university education advanced degrees downward mobility of graduates MOOCs (‘massive open online courses’) and productivity see also education urbanization utopias, post-work Victoria, Queen video-gamers Virginia, US state Volvo Vox wages basic income policy Baumol’s Cost Disease cheap labour and employment growth and dot.com boom and financial crisis (2008) and flexibility and Henry Ford government subsidies and housing costs and immigration and industrial revolution low-pay as check on automation minimum wage and productivity the ‘reservation wage’ as rising in China rising in emerging economies and scarcity in service sector and skill-upgrading approach stagnation of and supply of graduates Wandsworth Washington D.C.

Python Requests Essentials
by Rakesh Vidya Chandra and Bala Subrahmanyam Varanasi
Published 16 Jun 2015

[ ix ] Interacting with the Web Using Requests Reading data and obtaining information from web services tends to be a crucial task in these modern days. Everyone knows how an Application Programming Interface (API) allowed Facebook to spread the use of the Like button all over the Web and dominated the field of social communication. It has got its own flair to influence the business development, product development and supply chain management. At this stage, learning an efficient way to deal with the API's and opening the web URLs is the need of the hour. This will greatly affect many processes of web development. Introduction to HTTP request Whenever our Web browser tries communicating with a Web server, it is done by using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which functions as a request-response protocol.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

Inspired by blockchains but eschewing that label, R3’s Corda platform is built to comply with banks’ business and regulatory models while streamlining trillions of dollars in daily interbank securities transfers. The non-finance corporate world is also getting engaged. Hyperledger is a distributed ledger/blockchain-design consortium looking to develop standardized, open-source versions of the technology for businesses to use in areas such as supply-chain management. Coordinated by the Linux Foundation, it brings together the likes of IBM, Cisco, Intel, and Digital Asset Holdings, a digital ledger startup led by former J.P. Morgan powerhouse Blythe Masters. One mark of the business world’s enthusiasm is seen in the trajectory of media company CoinDesk’s Consensus conference, the marquee annual event for businesses interested in blockchain technology.

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Yet, unintentionally, he was also showing how the legacy business interests of an influential member could distract an open-source consortium like Hyperledger from building a truly open, innovative system. It soon became clear that the business opportunity IBM saw was to steer clients, particularly those eager to resolve supply-chain management problems, back to its own legacy businesses. A year later, IBM launched its “Blockchain as a Service” offering—marked by the first TV ad to use the word “blockchain.” The service encouraged clients to work with their supply-chain partners to create private blockchains that were structured entirely around an integration with IBM’s pre-existing cloud service.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
by General Stanley McChrystal , Tantum Collins , David Silverman and Chris Fussell
Published 11 May 2015

Boeing might gain in efficiency by outsourcing its production processes, but that outsourcing also means that events in a dozen countries across three continents have the power to disrupt its operations. The successful assembly of a plane now depends not just on a few factories’ remaining intact, but on safe passage across oceans, acceptable labor conditions in Japan, a lack of natural disasters in Sweden, stable exchange rates, and flexible supply chain management. In Iraq, we encountered unprecedented levels of disruption. An operation on one side of the country would spontaneously incite reactions from a cell on the other that we did not even know existed; one misstep of ours or one piece of effective AQI propaganda could make the social media rounds and spark riots within hours; one video of a militant attack would have an immediate effect on insurgent recruitment numbers and sectarian reprisals, and all of these events happened almost every day

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This is much harder when you are trying to achieve something constructive: AQI could dole out empowerment with relatively little shared consciousness because, with destruction as their primary goal, precision and coordination were not always necessary; but for most human endeavors struggling to come to terms with a complex environment—everything from supply chain management to aid distribution to marketing to national governance—doing something constructive is essential to their mission. Empowered execution without shared consciousness is dangerous. Similarly, shared consciousness on its own, as we learned, is powerful but ultimately insufficient. Building holistic awareness and forcing interaction will align purpose and create a more cohesive force, but will not unleash the full potential of the organization.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou
Published 20 May 2018

His huge, muscular frame towered over Sunny. “God damn it, we are working our asses off,” he growled. Sunny backed off and apologized. * * * — SUNNY WAS a tyrant. He fired people so often that it gave rise to a little routine in the warehouse downstairs. John Fanzio, the affable supply-chain manager, worked down there, and it had become the trusted place where employees came to vent or gossip. Every few days, Edgar Paz, the head of Theranos’s security team, would come down with a mischievous look on his face, a badge hidden in his hand. At the sight of him, John and the logistics team would gather in excitement, knowing what was coming.

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As Paz drew closer, he would slowly spin the badge from its necklace and reveal the face on the front, eliciting gasps of surprise. It was Sunny’s latest victim. John had become good friends with Greg, Jordan, Trey, and Ted. Together, the five of them formed a little island of sanity at the company. John was probably the only strategic supply-chain manager in the Bay Area who worked just feet away from the cold roll-up door of the loading dock, but he liked it because it kept him away from Sunny’s scrutiny and his obsessive focus on the number of hours people worked. Unfortunately, working in the warehouse is what eventually brought about John’s own demise.

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism
by Richard Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2018

Offices in all real economies, plus more than twenty recognized tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, enable them to orchestrate the great cross-border tax-dodging game.36 They are expert in each place’s tax laws, as well as the overarching international rules, and can easily spot the loopholes and gaps in this patchwork. Tax scheming designed by the Big Four now stretches as far as the wholesale reorganization of multinational business, usually under the euphemism of ‘tax-efficient supply-chain management’. This involves carefully carving it up into profitable and less profitable parts, parking the former somewhere tax-friendly. At a 2008 International Fiscal Association conference in New Delhi, an Ernst & Young partner set out the plan. ‘Centralization of management, control and business risks’ (the profitable part) would be ‘located in low tax jurisdiction’.

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Paul Gillis, visiting professor of accounting at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, quoted in Dinny McMahon and Michael Rapoport, ‘Challenges Auditing Chinese Firms’, Wall Street Journal, 12 July 2011. 35. Luxembourg Leaks: Global Companies’ Secrets Exposed, https://www.icij.org/project/luxembourg-leaks. 36. Lawrie Holmes and Alex Hawkes, ‘Big Four Auditors “Embedded in Offshore World”’, Financial Mail, 29 January 2011. 37. Tax Efficient Supply Chain Management and Transfer Pricing, presentation by Srinivasa Rao, partner, Ernst & Young, International Fiscal Association conference, 13 December 2008. 38. Proposal to work with Heineken on the design and implementation of a new group purchasing company, September 2010, PriceWaterhouse Coopers LLP, https://docs.google.com/viewer?

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 1 Feb 2003

Highly optimized tolerance: A mechanism for power laws in designed systems. Physical Review E, 60(2), 1412–1427 (1999). CHAPTER NINE: INNOVATION, ADAPTATION, AND RECOVERY The Toyota-Aisin Crisis The account of the Toyota-Aisin crisis on which my description is based is Nishiguchi, T., and Beaudet, A. Fractal design: Self-organizing links in supply chain management. In Von Krogh, G., Nonaka, I., and Nishiguchi, T. (eds.), Knowledge Creation: A Source of Value (Macmillan, London, 2000). Another paper about the remarkable Toyota group that guided our thinking on innovation is Ward, A., Liker, J. K., Cristiano, J. J., and Sobek, D. K. The second Toyota paradox: How delaying decisions can make better cars faster.

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Renormalization group analysis of the small-world network model. Physics Letters A, 263, 341–346 (1999). Newman, M. E. J., Watts, D. J., and Strogatz, S. H. Random graph models of social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, 2566–2572 (2002). Nishiguchi, T., and Beaudet, A. Fractal design: Self-organizing links in supply chain management. In Von Krogh, G., Nonaka, I., and Nishiguchi, T. (eds.) Knowledge Creation: A New Source of Value (Macmillan, London, 2000). Noelle-Neumann, E. Turbulences in the climate of opinion: Methodological applications of the spiral of silence theory. Public Opinion Quarterly, 41(2), 143–158 (1977).

Big Data Analytics: Turning Big Data Into Big Money
by Frank J. Ohlhorst
Published 28 Nov 2012

In-memory technology further benefits enterprises because it allows for greater specificity of information, so that the data elements are personalized to both the customer and the business user’s individual needs. That allows a particular department or line of business to self-service specific needs whose results can trickle up or down the management chain, affecting account executives, supply chain management, and financial operations. Customer teams can combine different sets of data quickly and easily to analyze a customer’s past and current business conditions using in-memory technology from almost any location, ranging from the office to the road, on their mobile devices. This allows business users to interact directly with customers using the most up-to-date information; it creates a collaborative situation in which business users can interact with the data directly.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
by Extinction Rebellion
Published 12 Jun 2019

When the hedge-funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after the ‘event’, I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply-chain management, sustainability efforts and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an ‘event’ in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied towards less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now. They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it.

Panderer to Power
by Frederick Sheehan
Published 21 Oct 2009

To eliminate this overcapacity, demand had to rise or investment had to fall until “the two levels cross, or the investments of the past several years have been obsoleted [sic]” by new technology. “Both of these require some time.” Grove went on to discuss the specific problem that caused such mayhem: “The viciousness of the down cycle was made more so by all the [supply-chain management software]. It blew through the supply-chain in a much faster ripple than previous cycles. Nothing in supply-chain management can read minds. End demand is what end demand is.”21 Greenspan’s productivity gains, if they existed at all, including the “Internet and electronic interface systems” that had prompted the “viciousness of the down cycle,” since they are machines programmed by people, and the machines cannot read minds. 17 Ibid., p. 123. 18 Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, “Federal Reserve Board’s Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Congress,” February 13, 2001. 19 Gerard Baker, “Greenspan Sees a Quick Rebound,” Financial Times, February, 14, 2001. 20“Intel CoFounder Sees No Quick Turnaround,” “Technology Briefing: Hardware,” New York Times, March 7, 2001. 21 William A.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

Industrial Operations—The Factory of Things The global plant floor needs a global Ledger of Things, aka the industrial blockchain. Factory managers will use smart devices to monitor production lines, warehouse inventory, distribution, quality, and other inspections. Entire industries may adopt the ledger approach to significantly increase efficiency for such processes as supply chain management. Large and complex machines, like airplanes and locomotives, consist of millions of parts. Each individual component of a jet engine or railcar could have sensors that send out an alert when it needs fixing. Imagine a train on its way from Baltimore to Long Beach notifying the maintenance crew in Long Beach three days ahead of time that it needed a critical new part.

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Government Digital Service, noted that the perfect register “should be able to prove the data hasn’t been tampered with” and should store a history of the changes that have been made, plus “be open to independent scrutiny.”21 Blockchain-based systems can infuse efficiency and integrity into document registries of all kinds and many other government processes. Let’s combine supply chain management with the Internet of Things to tag a new piece of equipment with a smart chip that communicates its provenance, ownership, warranties, or special information. Government procurement offices could track items and automate processes at every step: purchasing, releasing payment, paying sales taxes, renewing a lease, or ordering an upgrade.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

He developed techniques for mathematically modeling industrial systems, focusing on how feedback loops and time delays governed flows and stockpiles of resources and products. The culmination of that work, Industrial Dynamics, was published in 1961. It analyzed the workings of a General Electric plant in Kentucky, laying the foundations for modern supply-chain management.51 Having mastered the corporation, Forrester looked for other complex systems to which he could apply the cybernetic tool kit he now called generally “system dynamics.” When former Boston mayor John Collins was appointed as a visiting professor of urban affairs at MIT and, by sheer coincidence, moved into the office next door, Forrester seized the opportunity.

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R., 63 Smithsonian Magazine, 50 Snow, John, 189 social networks: cities as hubs for, 5, 159–64, 304 early days of, 123–25, 234 predictive recommendations for, 152 Songdo, South Korea, 23–31 International Business District in, 23 as largest private real-estate in history, 25 plans for TelePresence in, 49 as world’s largest experiment in urban automation, 24 Songdo U.Life, 49 Sony, 26 PlayStation Network of, 274 Portapak of, 115 Sopwith Camel, 21 Sorkin, Michael, on Archigram, 21 South by Southwest Interactive festival, 146 South Korea: broadband connectivity in, 26 tallest building in, 27 technological innovation in, 23–30 as world leader in smart-city technology, 26 SpaceShipOne, 203 Spain, 217–23 “15–M” movement in, 217 Sprint, 122 Square, 28 Standage, Tom, 44 Stanford University, 44 Starbucks, technological innovation at, 28 Steal This Book (Hoffman), 227 steam power, 5 Steenson, Molly, 21 Stockholm, 244 Stoller, Max, 150 Stoney, George, 116 Street, John, 194–95 Strickland, Eliza, 49 Strowger, Almon B., 36 structural design, innovations in, 19–30 Stuxnet, 266–69 suburbia, 101, 143 Sunlight Foundation, 238 supply-chain management, 77 surveillance, 270–76 private systems of, 275 Surveillance Camera Players, protest theater of, 13 Switzerland, 87 Symantec, 268 systems analysis: dynamics techniques in, 77, 81, 86 engineering in, 77 urban modelling in, 84–86, 88–90 Tabulating Machine Company, 61–62 Tallinn, 245 Taylor, Robert, 260 TCP (Transmission Protocol), 266 TCP/IP, 110 Teach for America, 238 TechCrunch, 151 technology: city-funded projects for, 243 disasters of, 256–58 innovation in, 107–10 overstandardization of, 249–51 repurposing of, 119–20 scaling of, 165, 201, 232, 243, 249, 313–14 as a tool of empowerment, 117–20 technology industry: limited urban understanding of, 224, 247–48 rhetoric of, 107, 278, 288, 317 “walled gardens” of, 123 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), 67 Tel Aviv, 233 telecom bubble, 44 Telecom Italia, 137, 161 telecommunications industry, 109–11 obstruction by, 197–98 telecommuting, 6 telegraph: city administration changed through, 5 as first urban digital communication network, 42 as fourth utility, 44 history of, 42–44, 254 industrial management changed through, 5 police use of, 5 in railroad operations, 5 Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske, 38 telemetry, 150 telephone: early history of, 5 evolution since 1970s of, 35–37 historical role in social networks, 160–61 TelePresence videoconferencing systems, 46, 49 Teoría General de la Urbanización (General Theory of Urbanization) (Cerdà), 43–44 terrorism, 270–71 Tesla, Nicola, 56 Thinking About the Unthinkable (Kahn), 277 Thomas, Martyn, 265 Tidepools, 293 Tivadar, Puskás, 254 Tokyo, Shibuya Crossing at, 34–35 Tolva, John, 64–65, 208–11, 294 To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (Howard), 94 “topsight,” 70, 72, 87 Torrone, Phillip, 137–39 Total Information Awareness (TIA), 270–72 Toughbook, 127 traffic engineers, 100–101 traffic jams: impact on cities, 99–103 prediction of, 7 Trendnet, 275 Triumph of the City (Glaeser), 160 Turner, Ted, 116 Twitter, 135, 151, 154–55, 240 in Arab Spring, 12 in Moldovan “Revolution,” 169, 171 in Spain’s anti-austerity protests, 161–62, 218 Uber, 232 ubicomp (ubiquitous computing), 113 “u-chip,” 23 “u-cities,” 26 Ullman, Ellen, 256 uncertainty principle, 88 Union Square Ventures, 154 United Nations: in declaration on Internet access, 288 demographic predictions of, 1–2 Foundation of, 278 Global Pulse project of, 181–84, 191 Millennium Development Goals of, 175 Sustainable Buildings and Climate Initiative at, 163 University College (London), 85 urban dynamics, 82–83, 89 Urban Dynamics (Forrester), 76–78, 82, 86 urban expressways, 101–2 “urban informatics,” systems to process signals as, 32 “urban information architecture,” management and business of, 32 urbanism, sustainable, 83 urbanization: digital technology intersection with, 4 problems of, 8, 162 Urban Land Institute, 30 urban planning, 77–92, 311–16 with computer modelling, 81, 295–98 cybernetics in, 84 “data enthusiasm” in, 315 grassroots organizing in, 8–9, 102–5, 235 impact of cars in, 98–106 innovative potential of, 9–11, 305–6 lattice vs.

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage
by Roger L. Martin
Published 15 Feb 2009

Lafley developed advanced skills and sensitivities over a quarter-century at Procter & Gamble before he took over the top job. He began as a brand assistant, fresh from Harvard Business School after a five-year stint in the U.S. Navy. He had already developed a stance that said the world would welcome new ideas, and that he was capable of generating those ideas. He acquired a set of tools over his career—supply-chain management in the navy, general management theory from Harvard Business School, and brand-building techniques from the masters at P&G—which he employed to good effect. Finally, he gained experiences that developed both his skills and his sensitivities. He experienced running large and highly profitable product lines that needed to innovate and grow; he experienced introducing a relatively unknown brand against a dominant traditional player; and he experienced firsthand how the decisions made by marketing managers affect the sales and distribution teams.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
by Alain de Botton
Published 1 Apr 2009

In an ideal Paretan economy, jobs would be ever more finely subdivided to allow for the accumulation of complex skills, which would then be traded among workers. It would be in everyone’s best interest that doctors not waste time learning how to fix boilers, that train drivers not sew clothes for their children and that Biscuit Packaging Technologists leave questions of warehousing to graduates in supply-chain management, the better to concentrate their own energies on the improvement of roll-wrap mechanisms. In a perfect society, so specialised would all jobs be, that no one would any longer understand what anyone else was doing. During a series of often bewildering conversations with members of staff, I came to realise that a Paretan utopia was now a realistic prospect at United Biscuits.

The Rules of Work, Expanded Edition: A Definitive Code for Personal Success (The Rules by Richard Templar)
by Richard Templar
Published 26 Sep 2002

You should, of course, know what they all mean. 224 THE RULES OF WORK RULE 95 You should also know what all the latest management disciplines are and how they might affect you. Try not to sound out of date when you talk of management techniques. For instance, it was called logistics in my day, but now it is supply chain management—and by the time you are reading this it will be something else, I expect. You should know what the advantages and disadvantages of any of these buzzwords are just in case they crop up and you want to look good. There ought to be a sort of bluffer’s guide to management speak, but I don’t think there is.

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking
by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett
Published 30 Jun 2013

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The past fifteen years have seen extensive investments in business infrastructure, which have improved the ability to collect data throughout the enterprise. Virtually every aspect of business is now open to data collection and often even instrumented for data collection: operations, manufacturing, supply-chain management, customer behavior, marketing campaign performance, workflow procedures, and so on. At the same time, information is now widely available on external events such as market trends, industry news, and competitors’ movements. This broad availability of data has led to increasing interest in methods for extracting useful information and knowledge from data—the realm of data science.

…

Data mining is used for general customer relationship management to analyze customer behavior in order to manage attrition and maximize expected customer value. The finance industry uses data mining for credit scoring and trading, and in operations via fraud detection and workforce management. Major retailers from Walmart to Amazon apply data mining throughout their businesses, from marketing to supply-chain management. Many firms have differentiated themselves strategically with data science, sometimes to the point of evolving into data mining companies. The primary goals of this book are to help you view business problems from a data perspective and understand principles of extracting useful knowledge from data.

Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition
by Imran Bashir
Published 28 Mar 2018

This layer can consist of many applications depending on the requirements such as transportation, healthcare, financial, insurance, or supply chain management. This list, of course, is not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination; there is a myriad of IoT applications that can fall into this layer. With the availability of cheap sensors, hardware, and bandwidth, IoT has gained popularity in recent years and currently has applications in many different areas including healthcare, insurance, supply chain management, home automation, industrial automation, and infrastructure management. Moreover, advancements in technology such as the availability of IPv6, smaller and powerful processors, and better internet access have also played a vital role in the popularity of IoT.

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs
by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips
Published 23 Jun 2015

I push the boundaries of what I’m allowed to do,” he told us. Berdish was originally hired to work at Ford Aerospace but couldn’t get security clearance because of his grandfather’s labor history. So he went on to work at Ford, first in manufacturing, then as a financial analyst, a purchasing manager, a buyer, and a supply chain manager, before moving over to manage Ford’s sustainability practice in 2000. “It was during my manufacturing rotations that I started understanding people and the health and safety issues.” He brought his breadth of experience within the company to start building out Ford’s leadership on human rights—health and safety—around the world.

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down
by Tom Standage
Published 27 Nov 2018

Manufacturers are more likely to be exporters than other types of businesses, and exporters tend to be more productive than non-exporting firms. But when politicians talk about manufacturing it tends to be in terms of the production line: assembling parts into cars, washing machines or aircraft, which adds less value than it once did. It is the processes that accompany assembly – design, supply-chain management, servicing – that today add the most value. Manufacturing, and jobs in manufacturing, have changed in ways that mean that the old jobs will never return to the rich world. Because of these changes, working out how many people are employed in manufacturing is tricky. Between the 1840s and the 1960s in Britain, manufacturing’s share of employment hovered at around a third; today, official data show around one worker in ten is involved in manufacturing.

How to Be Black
by Baratunde Thurston
Published 31 Jan 2012

I learned how to rapidly set up and tear down a bar several times a day whether inside a two-hundred-year-old dining hall or in the middle of a football field. And I learned that no matter the time of day, there’s some class of Harvard alumni ready to drink, from Bloody Marys in the morning for older alumni to cup after cup of beer for the younger reunion attendees. The job was thrilling, chaotic, and entertaining, offering crash courses in supply-chain management and interpersonal communication. It also taught me that serving alcohol to alumni is the best way to understand the value of a Harvard education. I got the opportunity, time and again, to interact with people at every stage of post-college life. I saw their hormones on a rampage at the fifth-year reunion, their parenting skills under pressure at the fifteenth, their hairlines receding at an inverse rate to their income for the twenty-fifth, and their dwindling numbers beyond the fortieth.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

No penny-pinching technology can remove the human from the fundamental process of creation, no piece of software can speed the production of thought, even as the cost of producing books gallops ahead with the rest of the economy. For many centuries, publishers lived in denial of cost disease. In fact, they spent large parts of their day in denial of the fact that they worked for fully capitalist enterprises. Over time, they rationalized their firms—they attempted to master the sciences of marketing and supply-chain management. Yet there was a fundamental mystery at the heart of book publishing. It was impossible to know the worth of a book before its publication, no way to predict its value with any precision. Each book is its own entity, its own fickle market. What’s more, the denizens of publishing houses didn’t necessarily approach their jobs with a mercantilist mind-set.

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets
by Andy Kessler
Published 13 Jun 2005

These new fund managers take risks, with assurance that the companies they invest in provide accurate information, have liquid shares, trade cheaply and quickly and exist free of stock manipulation. These funds rarely own Russian gas refiners, as they fail all of the above assurances. But funds do own weird companies that make components for optical wave division multiplexing or some new biopharma company or the latest in supply chain management software, but they require automated trading systems to stay quick of foot. The New York Stock Exchange is still a people intensive exchange. Its specialist system was created in 1871. And we are still stuck with the NYSE monopoly on listed shares. Lots of reasons are offered, such as centralized pools of liquidity or orderly markets, etc.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win
by Chris Kuenne and John Danner
Published 5 Jun 2017

Solutions count—they’re the currency of your realm. You don’t want team members to be your clones. You will need, if not always appreciate, analytical creativity and tenacity from other disciplinary backgrounds as your enterprise grows. In fact, team members skilled in areas outside your own personal interest zone—perhaps like HR, supply-chain management, or finance—may get far more freedom working in your organization. That can translate into a wonderful recruiting tool for you to bring exceptional talent onto your team in those domains. If you really need to master one of these areas in your company for your own comfort level, fine. But beware—your questioning can come across as second-guessing and eroding the esprit de corps and mutual accountability that are the hallmarks of highly functioning teams.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

Founded in 1996, Webvan was an online grocery business that did home delivery and operated in ten urban markets; it went bankrupt in 2001. Finally, Pets.com was founded in 1998 and sold pet supplies to customers; it closed in 2000. Logistics challenges were a common theme in the failure of all three: see John C. Wu, “Anatomy of a Dot-Com,” Supply Chain Management Review 5, no. 6 (November/December 2001): 42–50; William Aspray, George Royer, and Melissa G. Ocepek, Food in the Internet Age (New York: Springer Publishing, 2013), 25–35; Thornton and Marche, “Sorting through the Dot Bomb Rubble,” 121–38. 99, Yet an early observer … “This is horrible …”: Quoted in Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Back Bay Books, 2014 [2013]), 78. 99, Amazon’s margins were made … Amazon’s dot-com-crash blues: Ibid., 100–35.

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism
by Rick Wartzman
Published 15 Nov 2022

Glass bet big on Supercenters, selling groceries alongside general merchandise inside cavernous new stores staffed by some 300 workers. Some questioned this thrust, given the low margins and brutal competition among supermarkets. But Glass didn’t waver. “I’ve always been a proponent of one-stop shopping,” he said. And before long, Walmart used its superior technology and supply-chain management capabilities to become an industry juggernaut. In 1988, Walmart had two Supercenters. When Glass stepped down as CEO in 2000, there were more than 700 (as well as 1,800 Walmart discount stores, now in all 50 states and Puerto Rico; nearly 500 Sam’s Clubs; and a presence in eight other countries).

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister
Published 2 Jan 1987

Give them the chance to fly together, eat out together, and work out their roles in the new team. The Outward Bound schools make a thriving business of taking corporate groups into the wilderness and testing their mettle. Groups must make their way over Burma bridges and chutes, survive the waters of Penobscot Bay, or scale the face of Mount Katahdin. One day you’re struggling with Supply Chain Management, and the next, you’re hanging by your fingernails while a teammate belays you a line. Of course, the experience isn’t cheap. By the time you count the cost of the school, travel, and lost days, it comes to at least several thousand dollars per person. In most companies, such an expense would be unthinkable.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

For the entrepreneur—and we use the term loosely, to include anyone with a good idea and a passion to find an audience for it—pull means the difference between success and failure. As with emergence over authority, pull strategies exploit the reduced cost of innovation that new methods of communication, prototyping, fund-raising, and learning have made available. So-called “push-pull” strategies originated, aptly enough, in the fields of logistics and supply chain management, but in 2005 John Hagel, a management consultant, and John Seely Brown, the former chief scientist at Xerox Corp., wrote a series of articles applying the concept to a much broader array of fields. It has a particularly dramatic potential in hardware, since pull could ostensibly transform the entire supply chain in that industry.

The Secret Club That Runs the World: Inside the Fraternity of Commodity Traders
by Kate Kelly
Published 2 Jun 2014

Once they decided how to bet in the markets, they, like Andurand at BlueGold, would then turn to underlings to actually buy the proper contracts and watch their performance day to day. Ben Bergum, a graduate of Montana State University’s accounting program who now handled many of the details, had just been hired. He worked with other employees in Delta’s supply-chain management area who tallied the amount of fuel the airline needed and what its price exposure might be as a result. The group sat in the flight-operations center of the Delta campus, isolated from Jacobson and other finance employees, and Bergum himself worked in a cubicle that was crushed against a thick column, next to a printer, envelopes, and other office supplies.

Unhappy Union: How the Euro Crisis - and Europe - Can Be Fixed
by John Peet , Anton La Guardia and The Economist
Published 15 Feb 2014

OTHER ECONOMIST BOOKS Guide to Analysing Companies Guide to Business Modelling Guide to Business Planning Guide to Cash Management Guide to Commodities Guide to Decision Making Guide to Economic Indicators Guide to Emerging Markets Guide to the European Union Guide to Financial Management Guide to Financial Markets Guide to Hedge Funds Guide to Investment Strategy Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus Guide to Managing Growth Guide to Organisation Design Guide to Project Management Guide to Supply Chain Management Numbers Guide Style Guide Book of Business Quotations Book of Isms Book of Obituaries Brands and Branding Business Consulting Business Strategy Buying Professional Services Doing Business in China Economics Managing Talent Managing Uncertainty Marketing Marketing for Growth Megachange – the world in 2050 Modern Warfare, Intelligence and Deterrence Organisation Culture Successful Strategy Execution The World of Business Directors: an A–Z Guide Economics: an A–Z Guide Investment: an A–Z Guide Negotiation: an A–Z Guide Pocket World in Figures UNHAPPY UNION How the euro crisis – and Europe – can be fixed John Peet and Anton La Guardia THE ECONOMIST IN ASSOCIATION WITH PROFILE BOOKS LTD AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Ltd, 2014 Text copyright © John Peet and Anton La Guardia, 2014 First published in 2014 by Profile Books Ltd. in Great Britain.

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
by Paul Jarvis
Published 1 Jan 2019

For example, a company doesn’t need to put its efforts into developing a new online payment system; it can use Stripe, Square, or PayPal instead. A company doesn’t need to invest time and resources in building a content management system for its website; it can use WordPress. Streaming video required? Just use YouTube. Looking for supply chain management? There are now hundreds of software solutions. By using existing technology to run as much of a business as possible, you can better focus on your core idea—the core solution—and find your core niche. Because the first launch generally doesn’t yield amazing results, companies of one should try to get it out of the way as soon as they have something to launch.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global
by Rebecca Fannin
Published 2 Sep 2019

Among other JD.com innovations are unmanned convenience stores, augmented reality mirrors for online shoppers to try on lipsticks and other cosmetics virtually, and a service where a well-dressed courier wearing white gloves drops off purchases at appointed times to car trunks or other designated spots. Digging deeper into e-commerce, JD.com has embarked on a strategy to provide technology and logistics smarts as a retail service for its merchants and other retailers. This new initiative includes robotics-operated fulfillment centers, big-data analysis of merchandise sales, and supply-chain management. The company’s logistics operation, which I saw at work in a Beijing warehouse, is pioneering with full automation. The operation spans to drones to reach rural areas, autonomous delivery vehicles on Beijing university campuses, and self-driving trucks on select routes. Tencent has likewise begun digging into e-commerce too in China.

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism
by Hubert Joly
Published 14 Jun 2021

One of the initiatives introduced by Howard Rankin, who drove our diversity and inclusion efforts, was a “reverse” mentor program that paired Best Buy executives with employees who would mentor them to help broaden their understanding of differences. I was incredibly lucky to have Laura Gladney, an African American mother of two working in supply chain management at Best Buy, as my mentor. Our monthly discussions helped me see the world in general, and Best Buy in particular, through her eyes, which helped me measure the weight of history and what it means to be African American in the United States today. I learned how, for example, the once vibrant Rondo community in St.

Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game
by Walker Deibel
Published 19 Oct 2018

The company was selling a few million in revenue and had a handful of noteworthy, highly-respected, and well-known clients. 4 Through our analysis—although print management and centralized “brand control” was valuable to its customers—we decided that the real core competency of the business was in its inventory management and fulfillment capabilities, which provides its customers the benefits of lean supply chain management practices. It was clear that the product lines could be easily expanded. Indeed, one of the biggest clients came to the seller and asked if he could put other products important to their supply chain into the online ordering system. We saw the potential to build a true business-to-business fulfillment company from the existing infrastructure, providing a private and customized “Amazon-like experience” for companies with multiple locations.

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself: A Novel
by Marisa Crane
Published 17 Jan 2023

I text him a link to the definition of conditional then chuck my phone at the wall. I can’t remember my father ever talking about himself. Sure, I know some typical facts like where he grew up (everywhere), his major (chemical engineering), his GPA (3.34), his last job before he retired (director of supply chain management for an artificial flavor company), but I can get all that from scanning his resume. Who is he? I wonder. What does he care about? What makes him cry? How does he process his pain, if at all? Who does he want to be? All I know is, as a kid, the only thing that helped me sleep was the sound of the vacuum cleaner, and it was my dad who stayed up until all hours vacuuming my room and the hallway outside.

The Finance Book: Understand the Numbers Even if You're Not a Finance Professional
by Stuart Warner and Si Hussain
Published 20 Apr 2017

Today there is a wide choice of off-the-shelf systems such as Sage and QuickBooks, most of which offer cloud-based versions. Figure 4: Accounts Large (and increasingly some medium-sized) organisations are more likely to use ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems such as SAP and Oracle. These provide an integrated suite of subsystems which besides finance include supply chain management, production processing, customer relationship management, human resources and other areas of the business. The growth in technology has seen ‘finance’ change from transaction processing and routine analysis towards more ad hoc analysis and business support roles. Many large organisations use shared service centres (a central department within a multidivisional organisation) which are used for processing transactions and the more routine aspects of accounting.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014

The tyranny of choice: Why the consumer revolution is ruining your life. The New Republic, pp. 22–25. we need to ignore 39,850 items Trout, J. (2005, December 5). Differentiate or die. Forbes. one million products Knolmayer, G. F., Mertens, P., Zeier, A., & Dickersbach, J. T. (2009). Supply chain management case studies. Supply Chain Management Based on SAP Systems: Architecture and Planning Processes. Berlin: Springer, pp. 161–188. showed poorer impulse control Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision-making, self-regulation, and active initiative.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit
by Marina Krakovsky
Published 14 Sep 2015

Most of us don’t think about risk this way; we typically associate the word with danger or loss, what people in finance call “downside risk,” and perhaps also with gains, or upside risk. But more broadly, risk can be thought of as variability, volatility, spread, unpredictability—any deviation (positive or negative) from steady, predictable outcomes. This is how supply-chain managers typically view risk. Most systems benefit from predictability, so in most situations, variation is a bad thing: having too little inventory to fill orders (a shortage) is as much of a problem as having too much inventory (an overstock). Similarly, given the same average most people prefer a narrower spread.

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
by Jessica Bruder
Published 18 Sep 2017

The same economy that had been flattened by the housing crash saw gold prices skyrocket, and Nevada’s mines were hiring. More than a dozen former Empire employees left for jobs with the Barrick Gold Corporation, which owned several nearby sites. But others among the dispossessed workers were having a harder time. “I threw out a few resumes, haven’t gotten any bites,” former supply chain manager Dan Moran told me. “I might just end up cutting firewood for a living.” Monica Baker, twenty-two, who grew up in Empire, had recently moved back to town from Oahu with two young children on the promise of factory work, only to be broadsided by the shutdown. “I was really pissed off about it because they kept telling me I’d have a job here,” she said.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

They can also start the other way around, with a transaction – someone paying for the software that allows them to start playing World of Warcraft – and develop to enable a mass of gifting – players sharing content with one another in self-organising guilds. The industrialised economies spent most of the 20th century honing the management disciplines of mass production, from industrial relations to branding and supply-chain management. At the start of the century there was no science of management. By its end we had business schools, expensive executive training programmes, libraries of books, and pricey management consultancies. The web’s creative potential will be realised in the century to come only if we become equally sophisticated about managing and leading creative collaborations.

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One
by Debora MacKenzie
Published 13 Jul 2020

In the future, if deliveries depend more on automated systems, trucking may not remain as vulnerable—but the principle remains that if certain hub industries are paralyzed by loss of people, the impact can be far-reaching. There will be other choke points that depend on people: doctors and nurses, engineers who run power grids or essential manufacturing, or global supply chain managers are not all readily replaced. Even transient absences of key workers can cause snowballing problems. During Covid-19 lockdowns, oil refineries are shutting due to plummeting demand as air and road traffic fall. In a pandemic with a high loss of people, absence of workers at oil refineries starts becoming a problem.

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required
by Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung
Published 8 Jul 2019

Night after night, our account stared at us, all in cash. And I stared right back, paralyzed with indecision. At the time, Bryce was earning his master of engineering degree at the University of Toronto and taking an economics course. While most of the material was dry and not useful unless you’re in supply chain management, one article jumped out at him. It was about the Nobel Prize–winning concept created by economist Harry Markowitz in the 1950s: Modern Portfolio Theory. WHAT IS MODERN PORTFOLIO THEORY? Modern Portfolio Theory says that assets boil down to two measurements: expected return and volatility.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin
Published 10 Jan 2019

They are designed to be “an automated person who knows how to do a task in much the same way that a colleague would.”2 This is why Blue Prism describes their RPA programs as “robots” instead of software. They are synthetic workers, in essence. This type of AI aims to cut jobs for people involved in the back-office processes commonly found in finance, accounting, supply chain management, customer service, and human resources. RPA robots are remarkably simple to implement. “They’re easy to use and have a relatively low cost,” says Frances Karamouzis, who is research vice president of the IT research firm Gartner.3 Adoption of RPA is booming. One consultant company, Transparency Market Research, expects RPA implementation to grow at 60 percent per year worldwide through 2020.

Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices
by Harihara Subramanian
Published 31 Jan 2019

With the emergence of cloud environments as the one-stop IT solution for all kinds of business offerings and operations, it's projected that in the years ahead, most enterprise, personal, mobile, and web applications will reside in clouds (public, private, hybrid, and edge). The popular enterprise-grade applications are enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), knowledge and content management, HR, finance and facility management, and asset management. Besides, all kinds of operational, transactional, and analytical applications are also being modernized and migrated to cloud environments in order to reap the benefits (user, technical, and business) of the cloud.

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

Life-as-a-Service: The Twin Treadmills of Subscriptions and Debt 1 ‘Trip Adler’, Quote.org [website], https://quote.org/author/trip-adler-49853. 2 For more on Benioff, see Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler, Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company – and Revolutionized an Industry (San Francisco: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 3 Marilyn Much, ‘How Salesforce’s Marc Benioff revolutionized the software industry’, Investor’s Business Daily [website] (11 February 2019), https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/how-salesforces-marc-benioff-revolutionized-the-software-industry/. 4 Phil Wainewright, ‘Microsoft CEO to business: your future as a SaaS provider’, Diginomica [website] (16 March 2015), https://diginomica.com/microsoft-ceo-business-future-saas-provider. 5 Erik Bullard, ‘The escalating costs buried in your Salesforce agreement’, UpperEdge [website] (26 February 2020), https://upperedge.com/salesforce/the-escalating-costs-buried-in-your-salesforce-agreement/. 6 Mario Grunitz, ‘Everything-as-a-service: a look into the subscription-based model’, WeAreBrain [website] (30 August 2022), https://wearebrain.com/blog/everything-as-a-service/. 7 Quoted in Catrin Jones, ‘Caterpillar release cloud-based system to boost performance’, Construction Briefing [website] (23 November 2022), https://www.constructionbriefing.com/news/caterpillar-release-cloud-based-system-to-boost-performance/8024919.article. 8 ‘Power by the hour (PBH)’, AJW Group [website], https://www.ajw-group.com/services/supply-chain-management/power-by-the-hour/. 9 ‘The Princess of Wales rents a gown for the Earthshot Prize ceremony in Boston’, Harper’s Bazaar (3 December 2022), https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/fashion/fashion-news/a42139785/kate-middleton-rents-green-dress-earthshot-prize/; Rebecca Cohen and Madison Hall, ‘AOC only paid for her Met Gala outfit and other possible “impermissible gifts” after investigators asked about it, ethics agency finds’, Business Insider [website] (2 March 2023), https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-ethics-prove-paid-met-gala-outfit-house-report-2023-3?

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

But Hagenbeck did almost none of the actual animal capture himself; instead, he ran a vertically integrated system that stretched from trappers in sub-Saharan Africa to the showrooms and expositions that Hagenbeck began establishing across Europe and the United States. Wild-animal trader has an undeniably buff ring to it as a job description, but in the end Hagenbeck’s success was largely due to his skills at supply chain management. Notoriously, the showman did not limit himself to the animals of the world; he also staged a number of hugely successful—and, to modern eyes, hugely offensive—exhibitions of “savages in their natural state”: Inuits from Labrador, Nubians from the Egyptian Sudan. Yet, for all his travels, Hagenbeck’s most important legacy didn’t take shape until he settled down.

Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things
by Alasdair Gilchrist
Published 27 Jun 2016

There are already technologies in use that help detect driver fatigue. For example, Caterpillar uses infrared cameras to monitor the driver’s eyes, and a computer monitors blink rate and pupil size. Should it detect the drivers are sleepy, it will alert them using audio alarms and seat vibrations. Another possible use-case is in supply chain management where the predictive analysis techniques of Big Data can come into play. The world’s largest logistic companies need to know the latest current events on a global scale, such as the political climate as well as the local weather conditions that affect traditional trade routes. They need to know of impending strike action by traffic controllers or crane drivers in a shipping port, as these could cause massive disruption and have a knock-on effect to a customer’s stock inventory levels.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
by Arun Sundararajan
Published 12 May 2016

The charge: over the previous year, Amazon had hired about 15 of Walmart’s employees, including Amazon’s CIO in 1998, Richard Dalzell, who joined the company in 1997 after serving as a Walmart vice president. Walmart claimed that these former employees had leaked proprietary information about Walmart’s famed supply chain management systems. The suit was settled in 1999, but it underscored the fact that Amazon wasn’t merely investing in product variety or search and discovery innovations like user reviews and recommendations. They were making massive investments into inventing an entirely new infrastructure for inventory management, warehousing, and delivery, one that was optimized for a retail world in which goods had to be moved not in bulk to outlets or stores, but one-by-one to individual consumers.

Bad Data Handbook
by Q. Ethan McCallum
Published 14 Nov 2012

To modify the data is to clean it up, enrich it, or otherwise tweak it for some particular purpose. You can use the data to guide internal decisions, and also distribute it externally to clients or collaborators. The pattern is repeated as data passes from source to recipient, who in turn becomes the source for the next recipient, and so on. This is quite similar to supply chain management for tangible goods: one can trace the flow of raw material through perhaps several intermediate firms. Some goods, such as food and drink, have a final destination in that they are consumed. Others, through recycling and repurposing, may continue through the chain for perpetuity. One critical element of the supply chain concept is accountability: one should be able to trace a good’s origins and any intermediate states along the way.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends
by Richard Dobbs and James Manyika
Published 12 May 2015

Emerging-market companies have proven to be formidable competitors on cost. As we will allude to in Chapter 9, emerging-market players, particularly in capital-intensive industries, are increasingly capital light and inventive. That elevates the need for developed-market companies to innovate and localize research and product design, rethink supply-chain management and financing, and, in some cases, partner up to gain easier access to existing infrastructure. •In India, General Electric has devised an electrocardiograph machine that can be sold profitably for $1,500, less than one-fifth the price of traditional electrocardiograph monitors in advanced markets.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Published 28 Feb 2008

This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another. Burt found that bridging capital puts people at greater risk of having good ideas (his phrase) than do any individual traits. For something like supply chain management, it’s easy to see why this might be so—the department handling that function was separated from the rest of the electronics business and was not seen as a core function. The converse was also true; if the proposer of an idea was talking only within his or her own department, the idea was much likelier to be parochial.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

“Computer and Dynamo: The Modern Productivity Paradox in a Not-Too-Distant Mirror,” Center for Economic Policy Research, no. 172, Stanford University, July 1989, http://www.dklevine.com/archive/refs4115.pdf. 10. For instance, Materials Resource Planning (MRP) systems, which begat Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and then Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and, more recently, Business Intelligence (BI), Analytics and many other large-scale systems. 11. Todd Traub, “Wal-Mart Used Technology to Become Supply Chain Leader,” Arkansas Business, http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/85508/wal-mart-used-technology-to-become-supply-chain-leader (accessed July 20, 2013). 12.

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists
by Gary Marcus and Jeremy Freeman
Published 1 Nov 2014

We combine the appropriate multidisciplinary scientific and technical teams, including biologists, modelers, data analysts, and engineers, to industrialize processes and execute on delivering the product on time and within budget. Each module is linked into a large-scale data generation pipeline where standard operating procedures (SOPs), supply chain management, and careful quality control measures are all employed in a high-throughput setting. Once generated, data enters our Informatics Data Pipeline where it goes through multiple rounds of processing and quality control on its way to becoming part of one of our freely available online products.

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy
by Lawrence Ingrassia
Published 28 Jan 2020

How Locus robots came to be built is part of a broader tale of the revolution and fierce competition sweeping the logistics world. Once a staid business personified by barrel-chested warehouse workers laboriously loading and unloading crates, it has become an industry increasingly driven by computer science PhDs writing algorithms and developing cutting-edge technology for every step in the delivery process. Supply chain management has become one of the fastest-growing majors at universities across the United States, with tens of thousands of students enrolling every year. In 2019, roughly eighteen billion e-commerce packages were shipped in the United States alone, generating more than $180 billion in logistics revenue—many multiples greater than a decade earlier, figures that are expected to keep growing.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
by Ed Finn
Published 10 Mar 2017

From the revolutionary red of its paper mailers to the company’s triumphant announcement of service “whenever, wherever and on whatever device,” Netflix has competed and won based on the aesthetics of abstraction. It should come as little surprise, then, that when the company began to evolve from an Amazon-like titan of logistics and supply-chain management (moving DVDs around the country better than anyone else) to content creator, it would continue to depend on algorithmic analysis. But what happens when algorithms are used to shape the creative process, to create public works of culture that are far more legible to humans than to machines?

Istanbul Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Until recently, the art of bargaining was one of these. Times have changed, though, and these days the non-negotiable price tag reigns supreme in most of the city’s retail outlets. Here, as in many former stops along the legendary Silk Road, the days of camel caravans have long gone, supplanted by multinational retailers, sleek supply-chain management and an increasingly homogeneous shopping experience. Perhaps the only exception to this rule can be found in the city’s carpet shops, particularly those located in the Grand Bazaar. Many of these still take pride in practising the ancient art of bargaining. If you are visiting İstanbul and are keen to buy a carpet or rug in the bazaar, keep the following tips in mind: AThe ‘official’ prices here have almost always been artificially inflated to allow for a bargaining margin ­– 20% to 30% is the rule of thumb.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
by Rory Sutherland
Published 6 May 2019

.* Human self-deception makes our job difficult for another reason: no one wants to believe in its existence, and it is something which people seem only to accept at a shallow, theoretical level.* People are much more comfortable attributing the success of a business to superior technology or better supply-chain management than to an unconscious, unspoken human desire. Perhaps that’s because we patently need a level of self-delusion to function as a social species.* Imagine a world where we had no capacity for deception, and where people on dates directly asked prospective partners about their earning power and career prospects, without even pretending to be interested in their personalities.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington
Published 6 Apr 2020

At the Green Swan Day event, Tim Smit celebrated the combination of the internet, which enables everyone in the world to have a voice, and the rise of the “smartest generation that has yet lived.”56 The five principles of exponential leadership outlined next are all based on things we have been experimenting with. There have been ups and downs, of course. Several things I have been involved in have failed, including the Social Stock Exchange. On the other hand, several have gone ballistic, including the extraordinarily successful EcoVadis, a supply chain management company that has gone from perhaps a dozen employees in Paris when I first got involved to more than six hundred today, operating from a dozen offices worldwide. The five principles outlined in the next chapter are no guarantee of success, but they do seem to be working for us. I hope that at least some of them will work for you.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson
Published 12 Sep 2022

Samsung SDI, one of the world’s largest battery makers, said ‘it is impossible for us to determine whether the cobalt supplied to Samsung SDI comes from DRC Katanga’s mines’. Apple said only that it is ‘currently evaluating dozens of different materials, including cobalt, in order to identify labour and environmental risks’. VW said that its ‘internal system for sustainable supply chain management’ had not identified human rights abuses in cobalt supply chains. ‘It is a major paradox of the digital era that some of the world’s richest, most innovative companies are able to market incredibly sophisticated devices without being required to show where they source raw materials for their components,’ said Emmanuel Umpula, executive director of African Resources Watch, a local non-governmental organisation, who wrote the report with Amnesty.17 Amnesty’s report landed on the desk of Huayou’s headquarters in Tongxiang with an unpleasant thud.

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World
by David Sax
Published 15 Jan 2022

There was no turning back the clock on what Amazon had unleashed, but there were enough conscious consumers of books (and food, and clothing, and wetsuits) that opportunities abounded for alternatives to the monoculture of a future where you could only buy from one store. “Amazon feels like an algorithm,” Hunter said. “This feels like a place.” If it worked for books, could it work in other areas? In Miami, a Haitian American aerospace engineer named Nirva Boursiquot thought so. After years working in supply chain management with the Department of Defense, Boeing, and Airbus, Boursiquot grew tired of the judgment she faced as a young, Black woman in an overwhelmingly white, male industry. As she shopped for everyday goods and looked to support Black entrepreneurs with her dollars (especially after the rise of Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020), she saw an opportunity to help these Black businesses with her expertise in logistics.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

never met middle management: Min Kying Lee et al., “Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers,” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (April 2015): 1603, www.cs.cmu.edu/~mklee/materials/Publication/2015-CHI_algorithmic_management.pdf. every assembly line: For a broad overview of modern supply chain management, see generally Martin Christopher, Logistics and Supply Chain Management, 5th ed. (Harlow: Pearson, 2016), 35 (discussing how “just-in-time” strategy results in minimal inventory), 194 (the use of event management software to manage inventory levels), 225–26 (discussing the merits of Six Sigma management techniques), 289 (a change-embracing corporate culture).

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 28 Mar 2011

According to Schoemaker (1991, p. 552), “A deeper scenario analysis would have recognized the confluence of special circumstances (e.g. high oil prices, tax incentives for drilling, conducive interest rates, etc.) underlying this temporary peak. Good scenario planning goes beyond just high-low projections.” 24. See Raynor (2007, p. 37). CHAPTER 8: THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS 1. Some more details about Zara’s supply chain management are provided in a Harvard Business Review case study of the company (2004, pp. 69–70). Additional details are provided in Kumar and Linguri (2006). 2. Mintzberg, it should be noted, was careful to differentiate strategic planning from “operational” planning, which is concerned with short-term optimization of existing procedures.

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa
by Calestous Juma
Published 27 May 2017

In addition, all significant scientific and technical efforts require reliable electric power and efficient logistical networks. In the manufacturing and retail sectors, efficient transportation and logistical networks allow firms to adopt process and organizational innovations, such as the just-in-time approach to supply chain management. Infrastructure promotes agricultural trade and helps integrate economies into world markets. It is also fundamental to human development, including the delivery of health and education services. Infrastructure investments further represent untapped potential for the creation of productive employment.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

We are not intellectually or emotionally equipped for it, and altering ourselves to become so simply undermines the contemplation and connection of which we humans are uniquely capable. With this knowledge, however, we can carefully and consciously employ digital-era sync to the processes in our lives and businesses for which digiphrenia is not a liability. Real-time supply-chain management, for example, such as the system employed by retail clothing chain Zara, syncs the store checkout with the production line. At the same moment the scanner at the cash register identifies the yellow T-shirt, the information is sent to the production facility, the facility’s suppliers, and so on, all the way down the line.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a former economic advisor to President Obama, studies the effect of corporate power on wealth inequality, price hikes, and quashing of innovation. He currently gives Amazon a pass, believing the company shouldn’t be broken up. “Walmart figured out how to have better supply chain management and grew, and then Amazon did the same online so there’s more concentration in that sector and that reflects that increase in efficiency. That has a benign impact on the economy.” To understand what worries politicians and regulators both in America and in Europe, take the case of Brooks Brothers.

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce
by Natalie Berg and Miya Knights
Published 28 Jan 2019

I believe grocery retailers will have no choice but to copy Kroger or risk being left behind. CommonSense Robotics – which specializes in building automated grocery distribution facilities that operate in a fashion similar to Ocado’s CFCs – is more than likely the primary beneficiary of Kroger’s agreement with Ocado. Brittain Ladd is an expert in strategy and supply chain management. Ladd is also a former Amazon executive who holds the distinction of being one of the first individuals to recognize the need for Amazon to expand their business model to include a physical retail presence. In a 2013 research paper titled ‘A Beautiful way to Save Woolworths’, Ladd made the argument that Amazon should acquire either the retailer Whole Foods or the Texas-based regional grocery retailer HEB.

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World
by Jonathan Hillman
Published 28 Sep 2020

Patrick Sawer, “East Wind Train Blows In from China to Re-open Silk Road Trail,” Telegraph, January 18, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/18/east-wind-train-blows-china-re-open-silk-road-trail/; Tracy McVeigh, “Silk Road Route Back in Business as China Train Rolls into London,” Guardian, January 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/14/china-silk-road-trade-train-rolls-london. 30. Hans-Joachim Schramm and Sabrina Zhang, “Eurasian Rail Freight in the One Belt One Road Era” (paper presented at the thirtieth annual NOFOMA Conference: Relevant Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Kolding, Denmark, July 13–15, 2018), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328880505_Eurasian_Rail_Freight_in_the_One_Belt_One_Road_Era. 31. This is not a new problem, nor is it one that is limited to rail or even trade between China and Europe. At any time, some 45 percent of dry-bulk cargo ships, which typically carry commodities, are traveling without cargo.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jun 2011

Evolution is effective because, rather than engaging in an exhaustive, time-consuming search for the highest peak – a peak that may not even be there tomorrow – it produces ongoing, ‘works for now’ solutions to a complex and ever-changing set of problems. In biological evolution, solutions include photosynthesis, pairs of eyes and mothers’ milk. In economic evolution, solutions include double-entry book-keeping, supply-chain management and ‘buy one, get one free’. Some of what works seems to be perennial. The rest, such as being a Tyrannosaurus rex or the world’s most efficient manufacturer of VHS video cassettes, is rooted in a particular place and time. We know that the evolutionary process is driven by variation and selection.

The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross
Published 2 Feb 2016

Apps4Africa matches innovative African tech start-ups with the cash to get their businesses going and takes advantage of what is now more than 650 million mobile phone subscriptions on the African continent, more than in Europe or America. In addition to having the technology expertise, Grainy Bunch and iCow both reinforce the theory that wherever there is domain expertise and a willingness to apply big data technologies, there is an opportunity to create the businesses of the future. There are huge supply-chain management software companies in California and Germany, but Grainy Bunch was developed in a place with deep understanding about the supply chain for grain and grain markets. iCow was developed specifically for low-literacy dairy farmers who own just a few cows, the complete opposite of New Zealand, where Pasture Meter was developed and dairy herds frequently number in the thousands.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

It would most likely have to use a method called ‘agent-based modelling’ – that is, using computers to create millions of virtual workers, households and firms, and letting them interact spontaneously, within realistic boundaries. Even today such a model would be able to draw on realtime data. Weather sensors, city transport monitors, energy grids, postcode demographic data and the supply chain management tools of global supermarket groups are all giving off relevant macro-economic data in realtime. But the prize – once every object on earth is addressable, smart and feeding back information – is an economic model that does not just simulate reality but actually represents it. The agents modelled virtually are eventually substituted by granular data from reality, just as happens with weather computers.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

If risk could be controlled, then it could be increased and leveraged. For bankers, an efficient market theory was a persuasive argument in favor of wildly leveraging their capital to generate profits. Risk, after all, was under control. For corporate managers, EMT provided a rationale for controlling complex organizations at a time when “just-in-time” supply chain management was making it possible to expand globally. And so business schools began to focus on developing mathematical tools that aided in efficient management. The belief in the efficient market was so powerful that in 1976, economists Michael Jensen and William Meckling connected it directly to CEO compensation.

Money: The Unauthorized Biography
by Felix Martin
Published 5 Jun 2013

And rather than hawked on stock exchanges like fish in the marketplace, the buying and selling of bonds was done by brokers through their personal networks, like pieces of antique furniture that needed to be found the right home. Nevertheless, for most borrowers, banks remained the dominant source of debt capital right up until the late 1970s. It was only then that the revolutions in information technology and supply-chain management began to unlock the logic of specialisation and the division of labour in finance as in so many other industries. The debt capital markets, it was realised, represented a vast opportunity to create intermediaries that specialised in individual component activities of banks; and hence the potential for enormous gains in efficiency.

Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business
by Arvid Kahl
Published 24 Jun 2020

An example of this would be a widget that displays industry-specific time-series graphs drawn from your data. Service extensions will allow your users to integrate plugins that enable them to use specific, non-generalizable functionality to manipulate the data that your product uses. An example of this would be a plugin that would pull in weather data from a public API into your supply chain management service. If you understand your product to be a source and a target for integrations from the start, opportunities for extensibility will appear all over the place. Take the ones with the highest impact on most users and implement them first. In some cases, you can enter partnerships with the companies that sell the service with which you integrate.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

It’s telling that the fastest way to become one of those top 10 percent of companies holding 80 percent of corporate wealth is to figure out how to leverage not physical assets or even capital, but the value of “intangible” assets, including data, patents, intellectual property, and networks. Companies in every industry are counting on such electronic data to spur growth over the next several years. Data-driven artificial intelligence could generate up to almost $6 trillion in revenues for companies that deploy it successfully. (The biggest gains now come in sales and supply-chain management.)40 Most of the CEOs I’ve spoken to are extremely bullish on the subject, claiming their AI investments yield between 10 and 30 percent returns. But the more data the AI has to work with, the better it goes. That’s good for corporations, but will cause a tremendous amount of disruption for citizens whose privacy is being compromised and workers whose jobs are being automated

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets
by Thomas Philippon
Published 29 Oct 2019

This would predict a decrease of only 1 percent in retail prices, which is small compared to the relative price decline that we observe in Figure 2.3. What accounts for the bulk of the decline in retail prices in this period? The retail industry had clearly become more efficient, and the cost savings were passed on to consumers. Walmart’s advanced supply chain management system was a key contributor to this evolution. Through its vendor-managed inventory system, manufacturers are responsible for managing their own inventory in Walmart warehouses. Vendors can directly monitor the inventory of their goods in Walmart stores and send additional items when the stocks are low in a particular store.

Mining the Social Web: Finding Needles in the Social Haystack
by Matthew A. Russell
Published 15 Jan 2011

Or maybe you want to map out professionals in your network according to their job duties, or the socioeconomic bracket they’re likely to fit in based on their job titles and experience. Beyond the numerous options opened up by visualizing your professional network’s location data, geographic clustering lends itself to many other possibilities, such as supply chain management and Travelling Salesman types of problems. Mapping Your Professional Network with Dorling Cartograms Protovis, a cutting-edge HTML5-based visualization toolkit introduced in Chapter 7, includes a visualization called a Dorling Cartogram, which is essentially a geographically clustered bubble chart.

Business Lessons From a Radical Industrialist
by Ray C. Anderson
Published 28 Mar 2011

So clearly, when the option exists to move things by rail or ship, we can reduce our energy footprint substantially by choosing wisely. Checking off the box to guarantee next day delivery by air increases the energy (and carbon) by 800 percent! When the option exists to use UPS Ground instead of UPS Air for parcel freight, we can save energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and dollars. As our vice president for supply chain management, Tim Riordan, has said, “When you take out the carbon, you take out the costs.” (Incidentally, as we’ll see later, our chief product designer, David Oakey, says exactly the same thing about product development.) That is exactly what our European factories discovered. Though our plant in the Netherlands once sent about 650 metric tons of carpet tiles to Italy each year in thirty trucks, using rail has shrunk their energy and CO2 footprint by 40 percent, and it reduced their shipping costs by 25 percent!

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims
Published 13 Sep 2021

His embryonic start-up may have been a continent away from Silicon Valley, but it was well placed to take advantage of the talent pouring out of the many universities in the area, not least Mick’s alma mater, MIT. The fundamental challenge Mick and Kiva Systems faced was the same one that held back all of e-commerce: the world’s supply chains were not designed to handle individual items. Rather, they were built for containers, truckloads, pallets, and maybe, if your supply chain manager was particularly savvy, cases of goods. Various pallet- and case-level systems for handling these goods in warehouses were in use even in the late 1990s. Some of them were fairly sophisticated even then, most famously the ones pioneered by Walmart. Before Kiva, for nearly all retailers, automation in the supply chain ended at the distribution center.

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry
by Steven Rattner
Published 19 Sep 2010

As one of the few GM departments that could peer into every silo, from manufacturing to marketing to purchasing, it challenged small-bore capital allocations at the plant level and dictated how purchasing should handle a small, troubled parts supplier. When a supplier went into bankruptcy, which happened with great frequency in 2007 and 2008 as auto sales slowed, the treasury would hold up minor contract modifications that the supplier was trying to finalize—a process more in line with the duties of a midlevel supply-chain manager. As a result, Rick, Fritz, and other officers faced a mountain of daily decisions. Trivial issues loomed large while big ones got lost. Presentations on major issues to board meetings and executive meetings were often reduced to one or two PowerPoint slides and then put off or passed over lightly.

The Firm
by Duff McDonald
Published 1 Jun 2014

Bower countered that specialization would eventually entail flying people into and out of various local markets, undermining the firm’s practice of insinuating its consultants into the local business community.38 This issue with its push and pull was a constant for McKinsey, and one it wouldn’t ultimately resolve until the tail end of the century, when it stumbled on a characteristic solution. The firm capitulated to client demands for more specialized consultants while still maintaining a generalist veneer. In time, McKinsey offered its clients specialists in a range of industries and functions (e.g., supply-chain management, corporate finance) but at the same time managed to hold on to a vaunted image as boardroom consultants. The result: As with many things McKinsey, surface appearance didn’t tell the whole story. But the transition didn’t just take years; it took decades. In 1970 Lee Walton established a Practice Development Committee to look into carving out specific practice niches.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

Which do you find more persuasive: foxes or hedgehogs? 6. Does your organization tend to carry out a small number of long-term, high-stakes projects, or a large number of shorter-term, more iterative projects? * Enterprise systems soon became known by their TLAs (three-letter acronyms)—ERP (enterprise resource planning), SCM (supply chain management), CRM (customer relationship management), HRM (human resource management), and so on. † Or, to be more accurate, a few pieces of software. Not even the most confident vendors of enterprise software proposed that one single system would suffice for everything a company needed to do. ‡ In recognition of his work literally inventing the web, Berners-Lee was dubbed Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth in 2004.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

Trade Wilting There are several reasons why trade openness has diminished. For example, a shift in economic structure in China means fewer capital-expenditure-driven goods are traded. In addition, habitually weak demand from the eurozone has removed an important support for world trade. The rise of new technologies in manufacturing and supply-chain management has meant that many goods require less capital investment, and the trade dispute between the United States and China is fracturing international supply chains. Here technology has enabled some Western companies to relocate operations back to their own countries. Other indicators of globalization paint a more negative picture: cross-border flows of financial assets (relative to GDP) have continued downward from their pre-financial-crisis peak, probably because of the effects of regulation and the general shrinking of the banking sector.

World Cities and Nation States
by Greg Clark and Tim Moonen
Published 19 Dec 2016

The city has a deep culture as an entrepôt of trade and entrepreneurship, supported by its deepwater port, its British legal and financial frameworks and its bilingual status. Having made the journey from trading port to labour‐intensive industry, high‐value‐ added production and finally to internationally traded services and supply chain management, Hong Kong retains a large pool of agile companies in trade, wholesale, retail and personal services that serve Asian and global markets. It is also Asia’s leading city for higher education institutions and among the ten most visited cities in the world. Over the last 30 years, Hong Kong has established itself as the business and capital‐raising gateway into and out of what is now the world’s second largest economy, China (Table 11.1).

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
Published 24 Aug 2015

If we think of our laptops, for instance, we are not surprised when we are told that their various components—screens, keyboards, motherboards, batteries—are manufactured by different companies, invariably in different countries. And, within these factories, we would imagine a strict division of labour, with tasks allocated to appropriate individuals with appropriate levels of experience. We know that the disciplines of supply-chain management and logistics support the bringing together of diverse activities into a seamless single offering for the purchaser. Likewise, we see a move towards what we call decomposing and multisourcing across the professions. Professional work is no longer regarded as a monolithic, indivisible lump of activity, but instead is being decomposed (some say ‘disaggregated’)—that is, broken down into constituent tasks and allocated to other people and systems who are best placed to discharge the work at as low a cost as possible, consistent with the quality and the nature of the service required.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

A few weeks later, Byrne announced he would not only be paying bitcoin-accepting vendors one week early, but that he’d also pay his employee bonuses in bitcoin. What companies such as Overstock are trying to do with digital-currency payments has parallels with what Walmart achieved by pioneering communications technology to revolutionize supply-chain management in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Arkansas-based retailer famously developed a sophisticated network with which to tie all of its suppliers worldwide into a single, integrated database for managing the goods and services flowing in and out of Walmart’s warehouses. Along with big improvements in shipping logistics, this allowed the company to optimize its just-in-time inventory management, which drastically cut its costs.

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better
by Annie Leonard
Published 22 Feb 2011

The Skinny on Supply Chains To understand the path our products have taken to reach us, we need to understand their supply chains, which involve far more than merely getting something from point A (where it is made) to point B (where we buy it) but encompasses all the suppliers, component producers, workers, middlemen, financiers, warehouses, loading docks, ships, trains, trucks—basically every stop along the way from natural resource to retail outlet. In today’s globalized economy, a product’s supply chain can cover multiple continents and scores of businesses, each of which is trying to maximize its profit at that link in the chain. To that end, a whole complex science of supply chain management has evolved that fine-tunes every detail, to make and move things as quickly and cheaply as possible. Probably no one has more knowledge about supply chains than Professor Dara O’Rourke. During the years I was visiting polluting factories and dumps around the world, O’Rourke was investigating garment and shoe factories—sweatshops—in Honduras, Indonesia, Vietnam, and China.

Virtual Competition
by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke
Published 30 Nov 2016

A Cross-Country Investigation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, no. 4 (November 1997):1251, 1252, 1260 (regression analysis of a twenty-ninemarket economy sample suggests that trust and civic cooperation are associated with stronger economic performance); Stephan M. Wagner, Linda Silver Coley, and Eckhard Lindemann, “Effects of Suppliers’ Reputation on the Future of Buyer-Supplier Relationships: The Mediating Roles of Outcome Fairness and Trust,” Journal of Supply Chain Management 47 (April 2011): 42 (noting that empirical findings support other research that “trust is the most impor tant mediator in business-to-business relationships”). 46. See Maurice E. Stucke, “Is Intent Relevant?” Journal of Law, Economics & Policy 8 (2012): 801 (collecting studies). 47. Lynn Stout, Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 48.

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town
by Beth Macy
Published 14 Jul 2014

Double-digit wage hikes in China: Chinese wages rose 10 percent a year between 2000 and 2005 and 19 percent a year between 2005 and 2010, according to Harold L. Sirkin et al., “U.S. Manufacturing Nears the Tipping Point,” BCG Perspectives, March 22, 2012; https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/manufacturing_supply_chain_management_us_manufacturing_nears_the_tipping_point/. Reshoring movement: According to “Coming Home,” Economist, January 19, 2013, most of the multinationals bringing production back to the United States cited as their reasons the rising wages in Asia and the discovery of the hidden costs of moving production far away from corporate offices.

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 31 Mar 2009

Rather than just waiting for the hungry poor to turn up at its doorstep, it has become a food distribution giant, providing free school meals to 200,000 schoolchildren a day in Bangalore and, via sister temples, another 600,000 across the country. This miracle of abundance has been achieved by combining modern technology with modern supply-chain management and marketing pizzazz. The trucks that distribute the food display advertisements from global firms such as Philips, partly to raise revenue and partly to reap the benefits of what Chanchalapathi calls cobranding. His temple’s “strong and credible delivery model” is tested by his advisory board (which holds quarterly board meetings) and a “very tough” audit by KPMG, a giant accountancy firm.

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration
by Kent E. Calder
Published 28 Apr 2019

How Much Does the iPhone Cost to Make? A Comprehensive Breakdown of Apple’s Product Supply Chain,” Macworld, November 24, 2016, http://​www​.macworld​.co​.uk/​feature/​apple/​where​-are​-apple​-products​-made​-how​-much​ -does​-iphone​-cost​-make​-india​-3633832/. 32. On COSCO’s trans-Eurasian supply-chain management, see Frans-Paul van der Putten, Mikko Huotari, John Seaman, Alice Ekman, and Miguel Otero-Iglesias, “The 302 Notes to Chapter 10 Role of OBOR in Europe-China Relations,” in Europe and China’s New Silk Roads: A Report by the European Think-Tank Network on China (ETNC), ed. Frans-Paul van der Putten et al.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

These countries are coming up with new products and services that are dramatically cheaper than their Western equivalents: $3,000 cars, $300 computers, and $30 Mobile phones that provide nationwide service for just two cents a minute. They are reinventing systems of production, distribution, and exchange. And they are experimenting with entirely new business models. All the elements of modern business, from supply-chain management to recruitment and retention, are being rejigged or reinvented in one emerging market or another. Why are countries that were until recently associated with cheap labor now becoming leaders in innovation? Most obviously because local companies are dreaming bigger dreams. Driven by a mixture of ambition and fear—ambition to bestride the world stage and fear of even cheaper competitors in, say, Vietnam or Cambodia—they are doggedly climbing the value chain.

Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions
by Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher
Published 1 Jul 2009

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 12(4), 549–557. 204 CHAPTER TWELVE Download at Boykma.Com Chapter 13 CHAPTER THIRTEEN What Data Doesn’t Do Coco Krumme DATA DOES A GREAT MANY THINGS: IT ALLOWS US TO SEPARATE SCIENCE FROM SUPERSTITION AND THE repeatable from the random. Over the past several decades, scientists have scaled tremendously the processes for collecting, collating, and storing data. From medical decisionmaking to soft drink marketing to supply chain management, we’re relying more on fact and less on hunch. We’re letting data drive. But data doesn’t drive everything. Over the past century, psychologists have poked holes in the theory that people interpret data with anything close to rational equanimity. In truth, we’re biased in our interpretation of information.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

By the end of the 1990s, computers could be seen everywhere, not only on the desks of white-collar workers but also, in the form of miniaturized devices, in the hands of factory-floor workers. Companies eliminated a swath of clerical workers. Henceforward, managers could do their own typing and prepare their own spreadsheets and keep their own diaries. They also encouraged frontline workers to engage in their own reordering and supply-chain management. The other great change in this era was in the relationship between companies and the wider society. The great bureaucratic companies of the Keynesian age had accepted a litany of social responsibilities, from providing their workers with lifetime employment to funding the local opera.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 Sep 2020

And here is where we could see the emergence of new types of companies—“Auto-Tech.” These would either be vertically integrated or strategically allied companies, from vehicle manufacture, to fleet management, to ride hailing through their own platforms. They would be the master coordinators of multiple capabilities—manufacturing, data and supply chain management, machine learning, software and systems integration, and the delivery of high-quality “mobility as a service” to customers around the world. At this point, there is still no tipping point where the benefits of new technology and business models prove so overwhelming that they obliterate the oil-fueled personal car model that has reigned for so long.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
by Tripp Mickle
Published 2 May 2022

But it would take more than codifying Jobs’s thinking to ensure that Apple succeeded. The CEO wasn’t preoccupied with Harvard Business School concepts of organizational behavior. The company he had built operated like a starfish. He sat at the intersection of legs that focused on excellence in marketing, design, engineering, and supply-chain management. He would crawl out to the end of a leg when he wished to and get personally involved, directing each division as he saw fit. Before his death, Jobs pressed to keep the legs of Apple’s starfish together. He approached members of the executive team individually and pushed them to commit to remaining several more years at the company.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

Business schools are the boot camps of the global meritocracy. In the old days, Oxford and Cambridge selected and trained a national elite often by teaching them English history and literature, or a distinctively English style of analytical philosophy. Today, business schools select and train a global elite by teaching them about supply-chain management and globalization. Harvard Business School requires its students to spend time in emerging countries. INSEAD calls itself ‘the business school for the world’ and has campuses in Singapore and Abu Dhabi as well as Fontainebleau, France. Fuqua School of Business at Duke University boasts that it is ‘the world’s first legitimately global business school’; it has campuses in six countries.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society
by Binyamin Appelbaum
Published 4 Sep 2019

Carter also appointed two new commissioners: Marcus Alexis, also an economist, and Thomas Trantum, an investment banker who provided reliable support for Gaskins on regulatory issues. 75. Packwood resigned from the Senate in 1995 after it emerged that he had failed to adhere to the “consenting adults” standard in his personal relations. 76. Derthick and Quirk, Politics of Deregulation, 29. 77. “2018 State of Logistics Report,” Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals. 78. The average “all-in” ticket price, adjusted to 2017 dollars, fell from $632.92 in 1979 to $350.41 in 2005 — a decline of 45 percent, according to data aggregated by the trade group Airlines for America: see http://airlines.org/dataset/annual-round-trip-fares-and-fees-domestic/.

Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World
by Nick Bostrom
Published 26 Mar 2024

There was an interesting cluster of ideas that centered on building up ThermoRex’s presence as a cultural phenomenon. For example, one proposal that caught the Board’s attention was to develop educational modules on various ThermoRex-related topics—electrical engineering, thermodynamics, industrial design, supply chain management, business history. Award-winning film directors would work with leading scientific authorities to create teaching materials that were both engaging and informative, and famous actors would be hired to do the narration. Market research would be used to determine which versions worked best for different audience segments.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

Gras, N.S.B. An Introduction to Economic History. New York: Harper, 1922. Greis, Noel P., and John D. Kasarda. “Enterprise Logistics in the Information Era.” California Management Review 39, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 55–78. Greis, Noel P., Jack G. Olin, and John D. Kasarda. “The Intelligent Future.” Supply Chain Management Review 7, no. 3 (May 2003): 18–23. Güller, Mathis, and Michael Güller. From Airport to Airport City. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2003. Gutfreund, Owen D. Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Hall, Edward N.

For the Win
by Cory Doctorow
Published 11 May 2010

Pickpockets could have figured out whose purse was worth snatching from half a mile a way!” “All true,” Lester said. “But that didn’t stop these guys. There are still a couple of them around, limping along without many customers. They print the tags with inkjets, sized down to about a third the size of a grain of rice. Mostly used in supply-chain management and such. They can supply them on the cheap. “Which brings me to my idea: why not tag everything in a group household, and use the tags to figure out who left the dishes in the sink, who took the hammer out and didn’t put it back, who put the empty milk-carton back in the fridge, and who’s got the TV remote?

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

But they too combined automation with the creation of new tasks. With the emphasis on flexible production and quality, Japanese companies did not automate all of the jobs on the factory floor, instead creating a range of complex and well-paid tasks for their employees. They also invested as much in software for flexible planning, supply-chain management, and design tasks as software tools used for automation. Overall, during the same time period, Japanese automakers did not reduce their workforces in the same way that their American peers did. In Finland, Norway, and Sweden, where collective bargaining remained important and a large share of the industrial workforce is still covered by collective agreements, corporations have continued to share productivity gains with workers, and automation has often been combined with other technological adaptations more favorable to labor.

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

When Musk arrived at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, the Apple staff’s first impression was that he looked like someone who hadn’t slept well for weeks. They went into Cook’s conference room for a one-on-one session that lasted just over an hour. It began with them swapping supply-chain horror stories. Ever since the debacle of the Roadster production process, Musk had a deep appreciation for the difficulty of supply-chain management, and he considered, rightly, that Cook was the master. “I don’t think very many people could have done a better job than Tim has,” Musk says. On advertising issues, they reached a détente. Cook explained that protecting the trust surrounding the Apple brand was his highest priority. The company did not want its ads to be in a toxic swamp filled with hate, misinformation, and unsafe content.

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves
by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Published 15 Oct 2009

After attending the Browning School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Jamie studied psychology and economics at Tufts University; later, at Harvard Business School, he developed a reputation—as much for his arrogance as for his intelligence. Just a few weeks into the fall semester of his first year there, the professor in an introductory class on operations was going through a case study on supply chain management at a cranberry cooperative. Midway through Dimon stood up and interrupted him with, “I think you’re wrong!” As the startled professor looked on, Dimon walked to the front of the class and wrote the solution to the supply problem on the blackboard. Dimon was right, the professor sheepishly acknowledged.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Dec 2009

The new high-tech workforce of the Third Industrial Revolution will need to be skilled in renewable energy technologies, green construction, IT and embedded computing, nanotechnology, sustainable chemistry, fuel-cell development, digital power grid management, hybrid electric and hydrogen-powered transport, and hundreds of other technical fields. Entrepreneurs and managers will need to be educated to take advantage of cutting-edge business models, including open-source and networked commerce, performance contracting, distributed and collaborative research and development strategies, and sustainable low-carbon logistics and supply-chain management. The skill levels and managerial styles of the Third Industrial Revolution workforce will be qualitatively different from those of the workforce of the Second Industrial Revolution. A fully integrated intelligent intergrid allows each country to both produce its own energy and share any surpluses with neighboring countries in a “network” approach to assuring global energy security.

The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

Even a greatly advanced SI won’t make a dramatic difference in the world when compared with billions of augmented humans increasingly integrated with technology and with corporations harnessing human minds linked together internally by future versions of today’s enterprise resource planning and supply chain management software, and linked externally by extranets, smart interfaces to the Net, and intelligent agents. How fast things change with the advent of greater than human intelligence depends strongly on two things: the number of superintelligences at work, and the extent of their outperformance. A lone superintelligence, or even a few, would not accelerate overall economic and technological development all that much.

Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Published 23 Oct 2011

For almost a year Jobs ran operations himself, because all the prospects he interviewed “seemed like they were old-wave manufacturing people,” he recalled. He wanted someone who could build just-in-time factories and supply chains, as Michael Dell had done. Then, in 1998, he met Tim Cook, a courtly thirty-seven-year-old procurement and supply chain manager at Compaq Computers, who not only would become his operations manager but would grow into an indispensable backstage partner in running Apple. As Jobs recalled: Tim Cook came out of procurement, which is just the right background for what we needed. I realized that he and I saw things exactly the same way.

How to Survive a Pandemic
by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

3125 We were much more self-sufficient in 1918.3126 Since our global economy is now built upon just-in-time inventory control, companies have minimal stockpiles of raw materials or finished goods.3127 Modern corporations no longer have warehouses brimming with months’ worth of inventory. Grocery stores rarely have more than a few days’ supply of popular goods stored, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association has been pushing for even tighter inventory restrictions. The chief executive of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals told The Wall Street Journal that food retailers “can’t afford a just-in-case inventory.”3128 The threat of a bad winter storm can lead to regional shortages of key commodities;3129 imagine those shortages dragging on for months.3130 With COVID-19, though the toilet paper supply may have been wiped, food has continued to flow.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

Such flexibility might allow us to differentiate, for example, when the discursive structure of the relational database drives not only the information access policies of a company or state, but also in turn the form of its organizational hierarchies, and when the inverse is predominantly true, such as when the laws and logistics of trade channels structure the form and content of interoperable supply chain management software and the database designs on which it depends. In locating The Stack within the intercourses of economics, culture, and technology, both Conway's law (that organizations design systems in their image) and our inverse Conway's law (that systems and their interfaces produce organizations in their image) are interpretive tools that are useful to keep at hand.

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques: Concepts and Techniques
by Jiawei Han , Micheline Kamber and Jian Pei
Published 21 Jun 2011

This may not be effective, however, because many group-bys may have insufficient data and/or noise. A more general method uses the proximity of data objects in the space of contextual attributes. We discuss this approach in detail in Section 12.4. Collective Outliers Suppose you are a supply-chain manager of AllElectronics. You handle thousands of orders and shipments every day. If the shipment of an order is delayed, it may not be considered an outlier because, statistically, delays occur from time to time. However, you have to pay attention if 100 orders are delayed on a single day. Those 100 orders as a whole form an outlier, although each of them may not be regarded as an outlier if considered individually.

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice
by Pierre Vernimmen , Pascal Quiry , Maurizio Dallocchio , Yann le Fur and Antonio Salvi
Published 16 Oct 2017

All of the above should set alarm bells ringing. These are, in fact, the financial statements for Enron, which went bankrupt with a big bang in 2001. Note 1 i.e. earn a rate of return higher than justified by risk. See Chapter 26. Bibliography For more about the economic analysis of companies: S. Chopra, P. Meindl, Supply Chain Management, 6th edn, Pearson, 2015. P. Kotler, P.K. Keller, Marketing Management, 15th edn, Prentice Hall, 2015. P. Marsh, The New Industrial Revolution, Yale University Press, 2012. B. Moingeon, G. Soenen, Corporate and Organisational Identities, Routledge, 2003. M. Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, Free Press, 1998.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

Through Project Infinity, partly cloaked in Y2K spending, Coca-Cola turned the soft-drink business into a technology-fed numbers game. In 1999, the company hired 150 experts for worldwide implementation of SAP’s programs. SAP, an acronym for Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing, provided business software solutions for process redesign in supply-chain management, customer-relationship management, and resource planning. 28. Ivester did not respond to repeated requests for interviews. 29. Betsy Morris and Patricia Sellers, “What Really Happened at Coke,” Fortune, January 10, 2000. 30. Interview with Sharon Osberg. 31. Betsy Morris, “Doug Is It,” Fortune, May 25, 1998, and Patricia Sellers, “Crunch Time for Coke,” Fortune, July 19, 1999. 32.