World Trade - October 2008 - (Page 36)

SUPPLY CHAIN SURVIVAL GUIDE Can Warehousing Really, Truly Be Strategic? Pilot Freight Services You bet. Innovations and value-added DC services are helping shippers leverage their supply chains to compensate for a weak economy. BY GAIL DUTTON W arehousing has come a long way from a place to store product. Value-added services combined with some savvy upgrades are making them strategic players in shippers’ quest to do more with less. During the past decade, “companies may have shifted their manufacturing base, and demand patterns may have changed, but not their warehousing,” points out Bob Spieth, president of OH Logistics. To prosper in tough times changing the way you do things to become more effective in the existing reality vital. On the technology front, software as a service (SaaS) is a fairly new offering with great potential, especially for cash-tight businesses. With SaaS, users can access the software they need from an application service provider, when they need it, with the same ease as accessing a desktop application, and only pay for what is actually used. This means that users can access software to build highly complex, dynamic models of their supply chain at a small fraction of the cost of buying the application or the heavyduty computing power needed to run it. SaaS also avoids the headaches of installing and implementing an application that may be needed once every few years. 2008 SmartTurn Inc. launched the ﬁrst SaaS global inventory collaboration platform last June. “It runs over the Internet. You just need a browser,” notes Richard Yim, vice president of products and marketing. Designed for small warehouses and large supply chains, the SmartTurn Inventory Grid offers joint logistics planning, realtime visibility, permission-based inventory visibility, adaptive fulﬁllment, exceptions management and multiwarehouse inventory planning and distribution. To determine who can see what information, the information owners set the security and access levels in much the same way LinkedIn or Facebook users determine access—levels of permissions. For a price of $500 per month per warehouse, SmartTurn lets clients support an unlimited number of users. Yim says it’s becoming a popular option for 3PLs, who can now get their clients up and running in two to three days, compared to about three weeks for a traditional system. RFID is becoming increasingly common for high-end goods. Although the “let’s tag everything” mindset is employed by only a few major chains, according to Scott Burroughs, director of IBM’s Sensor and Actuator Solution 36 WORLD TRADE OCTOBER

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of World Trade - October 2008

World Trade - October 2008 Contents Tune Up Your Supply Chain Globalization: The Real Competitive Threat Supply Chain Watch Tradewinds Shippers and Providers Collaborate to Take on a Challenging Economy Tweaking the Supply Chain to Optimize Value and Minimize Cost Supply Chain Software Morphs Into Enterprise Management Can Warehousing Really, Truly Be Strategic? Everybody is Global Between the Devil and the Deep The Hidden Costs of ‘Free’ Translation Blowing Smoke

World Trade - October 2008

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