This past week I spent visiting my son in Colorado.  On one of our many adventures we hiked to an area in the Rockies that was a uniquely contained ecosystem.  One change to its delicate balance could cause negative impact to its carefully laid out environment.

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The recent superstorm, Sandy, and the Nor’easter that followed one week later, are continual reminders that businesses need to build redundancies and create business continuity plans for services and infrastructure. Not only do outages have immediate impact to operations, they also significantly impact supply chains. In fact, a recent study led by global multi-line insurance provider Zurich Insurance Group and conducted by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) found that the leading cause of supply chain disruption is unplanned IT or telecom outages.

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Supply chain “masters” are in the best position to turn rising fuel prices from an inhibitor to an opportunity for change, according to the Accenture report, Past the Tipping Point: Record oil prices require new supply chain strategies to enable future high performance. They masters understand the need to re-evaluate the various components of the supply chain. 

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In order for suppliers to be of value to their retailers, they must figure out how to manage customer relationships. Many suppliers have copped a victim mentality over the years and it comes as little surprise that retailers don’t want to deal with that attitude any longer. With products ranging in the hundreds or hundreds of thousands, retailers have come to expect more value add from their suppliers. They need to know which products are performing, underperforming -- or are so hot they can’t stock them fast enough. Read more...