Most Read
Most E-mailed
E-mail Article
Print Article
Whether the goal is securing a competitive advantage, or maximizing shareholder value, virtually all companies today are seeking ways to reduce logistics costs. Their efforts can take many forms, as these cast studies show.
In two of the examples, a manufacturer, United Sugars, and an organic foods distributor, United Natural Foods Inc., have turned to outsourcing to enable their operations to provide superior service at a contained cost.
The other case study, describing Procter & Gamble's use of real-time forecasting, shows how the global manufacturing giant is decreasing logistics costs by going straight to the source: by minimizing the volume of inventory needed in its supply chain to support sales, through improved forecast accuracy.
P&G's project demonstrates the continuing opportunities available to apply ever more sophisticated information technology to problems like supply chain design and management, thanks to Moore's Law.
"We really couldn't have done 10 years ago what we're doing today. Then it would have been cost-prohibitive, because you would have needed a whole server farm to handle all the calculations required daily," comments Robert Byrne, president, Terra Technology, which developed the real-time forecasting tool now being rolled out by P&G worldwide.