Monthly Archives: December 2012

Your Free* Holiday Gift from BravoSolution

Those of you who are BravoSolution customers should have already recieved Sourcing Innovation’s latest white-paper on the Top Ten Things to Do in 2013 to Control Costs in your inbox, and those of you who aren’t can download it from BravoSolution’s site (registration is required).

If you were following @sourcingdoctor on that which calls itself Twitter on Saturday (Dec 15, 2012), you would have received a sneak peak into two things that will tank your Supply Management Organization in 2013 if you’re not ready, which were culled from this paper, and those of you who weren’t can still follow @sourcingdoctor and read the post (tweeted in 140 character increments) in his tweet history. (Be sure to use Twitter or another twitter feed reader that presents tweets in reverse chronological order or you will be reading the post backwards.)

For those of you who disdain that which calls itself Twitter, this is why you want to download this paper:

  1. It cleary identifies and explains the seven fates that are going to tank your Supply Management organization in 2013.
  2. It points out the seven elements missing from your Supply Management organization that are exposing your orgnization to the seven fates.
  3. It lays out the ten competencies that you have to master in order to acquire the seven elements that will allow you to fend off the seven fates.
  4. It’s what you need – now. And it’s cool.**



* Registration required.



** Actually, it’s awesome, but making it too obvious wouldn’t be modest.

It’s Not Just About Cost!

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest post is from Dick Locke. Dick, who has delivered seminars to over 100 companies across the globe, is a seasoned expert on International Sourcing and Procurement who wrote the book. (Here is the link to his archived posts.)

Last week, I bought two home items at Costco. One was a Chinese-assembled and branded 42 inch very thin LED-lit TV for $300. The other was a U.S. made foam mattress for $500. Guess which one had an obvious manufacturing defect and had to be returned and which one worked perfectly right out of the box? The simple product from the US or the complex product from China?

Anyone? Anyone?

It was the U.S. built mattress (and it was so much fun to get it picked up and replaced).

Products aren’t going to come back to the US from anywhere unless our factories not only compete in landed price but have better quality than other countries’ products have.

While China doesn’t have the greatest reputation for quality in some of its products, its electronics (and I’m sure other products) are generally excellent. I’m convinced that quality levels are more a function of the purchasing techniques that buying companies use and less on the country of manufacture.


Thanks, Dick!

The Supply Chain Has Changed a Lot in 60 Years!

Sixty years ago, we had no shipping containers, no Satellite Communications, and no packet switching. That means no standardized shipping, no RFID or cell phone calls to remote locations where landlines are unreliable (because thieves are digging up the copper) or non-existent, and no way of tracking your shipments and status with internet and web-based software.

But all that changed in the 50’s. We had the U.S. Military begin standardization of the intermodal shipping container, which was formally standardized by the ISO in the late 1960s, packet switching research began in the early 1960s, which resulted in NPL and ARPANET, the latter evolving into the internet, and 54 years ago today, ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency) launched the world’s first communications satellite, SCORE (Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment).

And less than 60 years later we have the modern supply chain. It’s too bad that we didn’t have blogs 60 years ago, because it would be very interesting to go back through the digital archives and relive the New Florence. New Renaissance. that followed WWII. At the time, with the limits of communication technology, the rate of innovation between 1945 and 1969 was quite phenomenal. The current Renaissance didn’t really start until the introduction of the Web 20 years later (in 1989). Something to think about before the world begins again in 3 days. 🙂

Best Buy Experience? Still Not At Best Buy But …

… if you were one of the lucky ones, at least this time you got a few free iPads to give to people in need instead of getting nothing or unexpected free porn (as some people did earlier this year, as chronicled in Best Buy Experience? Not at Best Buy! Part I) or, in some cases, getting completely ignored (as chronicled in Best Buy Experience? Not at Best Buy! Part II).

As chronicled by Mark Rush over on Evan Schuman’s StorefrontBacktalk next year, now Best Buy has an iPad Dilemma. Apparently they shipped at least five iPads to at least two customers who had only ordered one. (See a recent article on iTechPost for example.) But at least this time they owned up to the error right away and instead of insisting that the customer ordered five and needs to pay for five, or pay the return and handling fees to return four, they decided to take advantage of the holiday season and find a little holiday spirit. They told the customers to “keep the additional iPads and give them to people in need” and get some valuable good press that they desperately need, ignoring the fact that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission Q&A stated that federal law required that the consumer could keep the extra iPads and not pay for them, referencing laws intended to punish retailers from shipping items to people who didn’t buy them in an attempt to extort them for payment later.

Now, as noted in the article, Best Buy could probably have gotten the issue to court noting that the customer did order one item, but I would have to think in this case that, given the nature and value of the item ordered, the court would reasonably conclude that an end consumer didn’t want more than one and the company should have appropriate checks and balances in place to appropriately manage such valuable inventory. Thus, it is likely this is a case Best Buy wouldn’t win.

My conclusion? They weren’t being generous and simply making the right decision to circumvent the PR nightmare that would have inevitably resulted had they handled it any other way and they still need to fix their systems. I could be wrong, but Amazon does a lot more shipping and seems to make considerably fewer screw-ups, or at least deals with them better as I haven’t seen nearly as many articles about Amazon screwing up compared to Best Buy in the past year.

Blue and Brown Make Dark Brown

Not Green! Someone over on Supply Chain Digital either needs a refresher course on the visible spectrum, or, if a discussion of electromagnetic radiation is too difficult for them, a kid’s paint set. What am I referring to? This recent article over on Supply Chain digital on how UPS and USPS Begin Partnership to Reduce Emissions.

I really like this idea in theory, but in practice, I wonder if it’s really going to reduce emissions or just create a lot of hot air.

Here’s the quandary. If the average UPS and USPS truck is going out half empty, than this is going to reduce the number of trucks on the road, and it’s a good idea. If the average UPS and USPS truck is going out over half fill, USPS will now need two trucks and the emissions will just be shifted from UPS to USPS. The other issue is that the packages have to get from the USPS network to the UPS network. How closely are the networks synced? Not only does a package now have to go through location B to get to C from location A, which means that UPS won’t be able to retire may trucks (as it still has to get the packages to USPS), but if A to B to C is twice as long as A to C, and this is the case for a majority of packages, are emissions really saved?

Also, with respect to the second part of the partnership, will the USPS be able to redesign its network to efficiently take advantage of UPS’ efficient global distribution capabilities? If USPS can, this will be great because UPS is much more efficiently structured to get a package to the right country given its focus. But if USPS can’t, it’s more hot air.

And all hot air does is scorch the earth, and turn it dark brown.

I hope for the best, but what’s the real incentive for these two companies to cooperate to the level necessary to really make a difference?