Energy & Infrastructure

Shields offers telecom operators complete solutions for their reverse logistics and supply chain needs.
By Chris Petersen

When Gordon Shields founded the company in 1979 in the United Kingdom, reverse logistics wasn’t something the telecommunications industry spent much time thinking about. Older, surplus and outdated equipment typically was simply thrown out, left to accumulate in expensive warehouses and forgotten about. However, Shields understood that there could be a greater benefit to its customers if that older equipment could be redeployed, resold or recycled rather than simply disposed of. Not only would recycling that equipment provide environmental benefits and help protect valuable corporate brands with full downstream audit trails, but Shields’ customers would experience significant OPEX and CAPEX savings by having their equipment redeployed by others.

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QMax’s Supply Chain operations are a crucial part of its success in the oilfield services market.
By Chris Petersen

Most industries face difficulties in down turns, however, no industry in the last 18 months knows that better than the oil and gas industry. A precipitous drop in oil prices has wreaked havoc with the energy market. One of the many companies affected is Houston-based QMax, a provider of drilling and completion fluids, waste management, solids control, transportation, and wellbore cleanup services to the oilfield market.

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Qualcomm’s highly complex supply chain operations give it greater flexibility in the fast-paced world of technology.
By Chris Petersen

Qualcomm Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, operates, along with its subsidiaries, substantially all of Qualcomm’s products and services businesses, including its semiconductor business, QCT. As the world’s largest provider of wireless communication technology, Qualcomm Technologies is all about connectivity. This shows even in the company’s supply chain, which brings together a very large network of partner manufacturers and distributors to supply the billions of processors, modems and other components the company delivers each year. Senior Director of Supply Chain, Mark Utter, says the company’s success rate in terms of its supply chain is well above the industry average, even though the company depends entirely on third-party providers for manufacturing of its integrated circuit products.

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Westcon Group Inc. focuses on continuous improvement in inventory management and strives to provide value-added services as the industry demands more than just pick, pack and ship services. “From a supply chain perspective, vendors and resellers define quality around inventory and shipment accuracy, supply chain visibility and how agile we are,” Vice President of Operations Kevin Brzezinski says. “Along with that, they measure how fast we can get a product on the shelf and ship to the end-user.” 

Celebrating 30 years of supporting its partners, the Tarrytown, N.Y.-based company is a value-added distributor of category-leading unified communications, network infrastructure, data center and security solutions with a global network of specialty resellers. “We have 27 logistics facilities on six continents, the ability to transact locally in 74 countries and deploy products in 191 countries on an annual basis,” Brzezinski adds. “We have a very strong portfolio and a very strong brand.”

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