Mercedes-Benz USA has the people and facility infrastructure in place to support its growth.
By Tim O’Connor
When Rory Hepner and her team visit the carriers that transport trucks across the country for Mercedes-Benz, they often hand out small gifts such as hats and T-shirts or they may host a cookout for drivers. Those are small gestures, but ones that show the company’s appreciation for its carriers and acknowledge their contributions toward making Mercedes-Benz one of the world’s leading premium automakers.
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PartsSource offers hospitals a single source for their parts and services needs to reduce supply chain costs and increase asset uptime.
By Jim Harris
Healthcare providers look to PartsSource as a single source for biomedical and diagnostic imaging on-demand products. “We are often described as being part Amazon, part group purchasing organization [GPO] and part enterprise resource planning system,” President and CEO Dr. Phil Settimi says.
The Cleveland, Ohio-headquartered company delivers the industry’s only online, fully integrated medical products and parts procurement e-commerce marketplace for hospitals, clinical sites and health systems across the country. “Some hospitals have to work with hundreds of vendors to keep their hospital equipment running,” adds Kate Shafer, director of marketing and communications. “PartsSource is able to manage all those vendors on their behalf. The customer knows they can use the same ordering process for everything they need and PartsSource acts as part of their supply chain.”
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Lindt & Sprüngli USA aims to tap further into the chocolate market
with innovative technologies and a quality, premium product.
By Bianca Herron
Lindt & Sprüngli is an international manufacturer, distributor and retailer of premium chocolate. Since its founding in Switzerland 170 years ago, the company has been driven by its passion, dedication and innovative spirit to create the ultimate chocolate.
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Medical Specialties Distributors improves its fill rate performance for its customers’ patients through distribution enhancements.
By Janice Hoppe-Spiers
As a leading healthcare solutions provider serving the home infusion, home medical equipment, oncology and long-term care markets, it is vital for Medical Specialties Distributors (MSD) to offer fast delivery of supplies to meet the ever-changing needs of its customers. To ensure the company’s success, Director of Supply Chain Tony Calabria has been focused on improvements to materials management processes for the past two years. “MSD’s supply chain is very fluid and continues to adapt to service the needs of patients,” Calabria says. “If we don’t have what they need, don’t do a good job processing the demand signals we get and don’t collaborate well with our suppliers, we impact the patient. People are reliant on us and we take that mission very seriously.”
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With innovative technology and a customer driven mentality, Safelite AutoGlass aims to continue to grow further.
By Bianca Herron
Safelite® Group exists to make a difference and bring unexpected happiness to people’s everyday lives through an array of services. It is comprised of three major businesses: Safelite AutoGlass®, the largest provider of vehicle glass repair and replacement services in the U.S.; Safelite® Solutions, the nation’s leading fleet and insurance claims management service partner; and Service AutoGlass®, a sophisticated vehicle glass wholesale supply chain and distribution operation.
Together, the businesses serve 10 million customers annually through more than 9,200 MobileGlassShopsTM and facilities. Safelite Group employs nearly 14,000 people throughout the United States. Based in Columbus, Ohio, the company has been in business since 1947.
Although Safelite is a 70-year old company, the company likes to think of itself more like a startup, according to Senior Vice President of Operations and Supply Chain Steve Miggo. He notes that the company revitalized its strategy about eight years ago to become people powered and customer driven.
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Supply chain organizations are discovering the benefits of integrated business planning.
By Neal Goffman
Executive teams need accurate forecasts to set performance benchmarks, and optimize targets for revenue, profit, territory, pipeline opportunity, and more. Production and procurement teams need them to optimize required resources such as raw materials, people, and equipment. Finance needs them to weigh capital investments against liquidity needs. Wouldn’t it be great if every functional team in the organization could work off of and share the same, statistically derived, continually updated, cloud-based demand data?
Fact is, too many organizations still email spreadsheet updates and manually aggregate inputs from sales teams based on gut-feel assumptions. Other organizations rely on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications or other transactional databases to inform their monthly or quarterly Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) meetings. These systems, though highly valuable, are simply not geared for forecasting and planning. Truth be told, the manual and non-statistical processes associated with both spreadsheets and legacy BI systems are error-prone, labor-intensive, and generally ineffective for forecasting and planning.
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Procurement Requires a Strategic Spend Analysis Solution
By David Bush
At a high level, spend analysis is the process of aggregating, classifying and leveraging spend data for the purpose of gaining visibility into cost reduction, performance improvement, compliance and other value generation opportunities. It is part of an overall spend management and visibility process that includes the analysis, award and monitoring of direct and indirect corporate spend. Additionally, it is the first and last step of the strategic sourcing process that both identifies the opportunity and measures the organization's achievement thereof.
While these solutions have been around for decades, many companies that own them still struggle achieving enterprise-level spend visibility. Much of their time is spent manipulating the data on their own or managing the tool itself, rather than managing strategic initiatives.
Which begs the obvious question. In a world where several spend analysis solutions claim to provide enterprise-level spend visibility, why are these tools failing to achieve complete visibility for organizations?
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By better understanding its customers’ needs now, Höegh Autoliners is positioning itself for the future to expand in the automotive supply chain.
By Janice Hoppe-Spiers
Höegh Autoliners strives to be the go-to roll-on/roll-off [RO/RO] carrier in a globalized marketplace by remaining flexible and reliable while developing creative solutions at competitive prices. As its customers needs continue to evolve, the company is working to offer a wider range of services in the automotive supply chain.
“I think that what sets us apart is our flexibility and our relentless dedication and focus on customer excellence,” Head of Region Americas Shane Warren says. “We are not the biggest RO/RO carrier, but that helps us because we have more flexibility to meet their needs. It’s about understanding the customers’ needs, helping them understand where they have waste in their system and how we can help them to be more efficient.”
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