Elemica Blog

What’s So Different About It?

As you may be aware, Elemica offers Sourcing Services for more or less every category of indirect spend, including both products and also services such as facility services like security or temporary labor.  We also have a specialized offering in the area of Logistics Sourcing.  But what makes it so different from other sourcing events?

In a nutshell, it’s much more complex, and much more data-intensive, than other categories of indirect spend.  In a logistics bid of any size, you immediately get into the territory of large numbers, with many combinations of Ship-From and Ship-To locations.  The number of from-to “lanes” can easily number in the hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands for some of our larger clients.

Great Sailing for Shippers Running Global Ocean Sourcing Events

Look out from any observation desk on a sea facing building in Singapore and behold the activity at one of the world’s busiest ports. Unfortunately, over the past nine months, many of the ships anchored along the Singapore and Malaysian coast are not waiting for their turn to load cargo but instead are parked idle, waiting for higher freight rates before being put back into service by their owners.

Changing Global Markets Require Stronger Partnerships with Logistics Providers

The combination of global markets, the proliferation of products with rapidly changing demand levels, and rising customer expectations requires more sophisticated, more flexible and more responsive supply chains. New opportunities and challenges arising from changing global markets places a demand on companies to establish stronger partnerships with Logistics Service Providers.

Companies that can connect their supply chain with the supply chains of their suppliers and customers together in a single network optimize costs and maximize opportunities for all parties involved.

Road Transport Execution

There is a saying in London, that you seem to wait for ever for a bus and then three come along at the same time. It is feeling a bit like that in our Logistics Management suite, although it has not been long since the last bus filled up and moved out. In the past few months we have had three companies kick-off new projects to connect to logistics partners.

Automating the booking and visibility of road shipments has been on the agenda for 20 plus years. Most of the sizable logistics service providers have sophisticated systems capable of sending and receiving data.

Elemica Launches our Newest Product Offering

As supply chain professionals look to manage the challenges of volatility, variability and complexity - while simultaneously dealing with the pressures of reducing costs, maximizing profit and maintaining customer service at desired levels - Transportation Management Solutions (TMS) become an increasingly strategic part of the toolset and support for collaborative processes becomes more essential.

According to Gartner’s recently published Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Solutions (September 2011) over the next 12 months, cost increases and capacity constraints in logistics and transportation will require better collaboration between shippers and carriers as well as the need for shippers to likely increase the number of carriers they work with and support more sophisticated processes. This is expected to drive more deployments of TMS solutions as shippers seek to support these processes.

Elemica and our clients are no strangers to the benefits that can be achieved through collaboration.

Who is more attractive?

So who is more attractive Natalie Portman, or Scarlet Johansson? Or maybe you think that it is Diana Rigg or Sophia Loren? How can you say one is better than another. This is how I feel around supply chains. The nicest part of my job is that I get to hear about lots of different supply chain needs and get to offer opinions on ways to improve them. I cannot say one is better than another, we have some mature supply chains and we have some newer models. We have ones that are changing because of new technology or new product portfolios.

It is Nice to be Ahead of a Trend

I don’t claim to be Steve Job, but being able to talk to companies knowing you have something that is ahead of the market is refreshing. What do we have that is so clever? Well, something to manage inbound logistics.

Now that may not sound so clever, but it is something that nobody seems to have focused on. 

I have had two conversations over the last few weeks, one was a tyre company and one was in the paper industry. Both of them are saying that tracking inbound raw materials would add value. BIG value. It is the difference between a plant running smoothly and having to get emergency shipments to keep a plant running.

How often do you have a stroke of creativity brought about by an inconvenience that you suffer regularly?

“If only someone would figure out how to combine all of my reward cards in one place!”  (As it turns out, there is a mobile application for this.)  Sometimes you are not even aware of the extra time you spend working around these pervasive problems. They simply become part of your process.

Upon joining Elemica in April 2011, I was faced with examining our Logistics Management Suite and establishing the strategy for future capabilities.  I found that our current solutions have two things in common:  the logistics business problems they solve all require (1) connectivity and (2) collaboration.

Consider these examples: