Welcome to the Spring 2020 edition of Supply Chain Navigator. The economic impacts of this near-global shutdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic has thrust supply chain into the realm of public discourse in a way we have never seen before. Suddenly average citizens, who never once considered what it took to keep the grocery store…
An Avnet Publication
Archive
Tom Linton, Author, Executive Advisor & Digital Supply Chain Innovator
One-on-One Profile Background: Retired as Chief Procurement and SCO at Flex in 2019. Held executive procurement positions with IBM, Agere Systems, Freescale and LG Electronics, and helped found software firm E2Open. Books Authored: “The Living Supply Chain: The Evolving Imperative of Operating in Real Time” Honors/Recognitions: Institute of Supply Management’s J. Shipman Gold Medal, 2019;…
Is Corporate Hierarchy Undermining Your Digital Transformation Progress?
With the exception of the brilliant mission control engineers at NASA who famously saved the lives of the Apollo 13 crew by brainstorming a solution to make a square CO2 filter fit into a space designed for a round one, most of us learn at a pretty early age that as hard as we may…
New Perspectives for Driving Value in Smart Factory Implementation
Editor’s Note: In a recently published report, “Implementing the Smart Factory,” Deloitte thought leaders Stephen Laaper, Ben Dollar, Mark Cotteleer and Brenna Sniderman offer insights on how manufacturing leaders with hands-on experience are implementing and realizing value (cost, throughput, quality, safety and revenue growth) from smart factory transformations. The following is a summary of the…
Want to Avoid a Trade War? Let Firms Do What Comes Naturally
By Morris A. Cohen We are in a period of intense global economic warfare. The U.S. is engaged in trade disputes with China, the European Union, Mexico, and Canada. We have been told that trade is a zero-sum game with one country’s gain coming at the expense of another country’s loss, and that a trade…
Understanding Raw Materials Risks in Automotive and Electronics Supply Chains
By Michèle Brülhart, Director of Innovations, Responsible Business Alliance Worldwide, businesses increasingly seek solutions to shared development problems and are responding to calls from regulatory bodies, investors, consumers and civil society stakeholders to transparently address adverse impacts associated with their supply chains. However, assessing environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks in raw material extraction and…
2019 Supply Chain Resolutions
Joe DiIorio Director, Supply Chain, Global Workforce Development, Seagate Technology “Slow down to speed up. In 2019, I am going to make a more concerted effort to take time to dispense with certain tactical, non-value-add type chores that will free up time to focus on more strategic opportunities. For example, when I get solicitor emails that…
Follow the Money
Aligning financial and physical flows key to true supply chain optimization There are three basic elements that define the core strength of every supply chain – big or small, local or global – the product or service being bought/sold; the insights from information that is generated and shared through the source-make-deliver lifecycle; and the actual…
Character Counts
Innovative Scoring Tool Uses Behavioral Cues to Assess Credit Risk Editor’s Note: Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (now LenddoEFL) first pioneered psychometric credit scoring through research at the Harvard Center for International Development in 2006. The project aims to stimulate entrepreneurial finance in emerging markets by developing low-cost credit screening tools that address the information asymmetry which…
Why Blockchain Needs to be Part of Your Supply Chain Strategy
By Renée Ure, Vice President, Global Supply Chain for Lenovo If business is about creating customer value, then the supply chain is about delivering that value to the customer in the most efficient and effective manner. At Lenovo, we work with numerous component manufacturers and suppliers to produce our servers. We enter into an agreement…