A VC in Vacationland
Seeking the next gen supply chain technology breakthroughs
recent posts
- The Role of Generative AI in Supply Chain Investment Strategies
- AI’s Impact on Supply Chain Investment Strategies
- The ‘New Normal’ is now the ‘No Normal’ in Supply Chains
- SRR—Sustainability, Resilience, Risk Management: The Latest Supply Chain Buzzwords & Investment Opportunities
- 3PLs–Investing in the Next Generation of Outsourced Supply Chain Solutions
about
Category: Marketing & Sales Strategy
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I am a book collector. Not a big one, but just first editions of books I particularly enjoyed reading and can reasonably afford. That does eliminate first editions of the James Bond novels, which can sell for $6,000 to $10,000 apiece in the rare book market today. If I'd only known that when I first…
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Successful start ups often attract major customers, so called innovation buyers, who end up getting an inordinate amount of time and attention from the entrepreneurs and employees. Innovation buyers are leading-edge companies who want to have all the latest technology to manage their operations. These buyers seek out start ups with interesting solutions, assign staff…
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The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan is one of the best supply chain strategy books ever written. That’s a pretty strong endorsement from a guy who’s read most if not all supply chain strategy books produced in the last thirty years. It’s not your classic supply chain strategy book, but one that explores where your food…
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Where does your supply chain thinking stop? When it goes out the door of your distribution center? At the customer DC? At the store back room or shelf? Or as it goes out the door in the hands of the consumer? For the typical consumer products company, I’ll bet that it probably stops when it…
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"You are either part of the problem, the solution or the landscape" Robert DeNiro Ronin (1998) Ronin is the Japanese word used for Samurai without a master. In this case, the Ronin are outcast specialists of every kind, whose services are available to everyone – for…
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I never thought that any supply chain or marketing innovators would get a editorial in the New York Sunday Times, but it happened. The new Eagles album–Long Road out of Eden–was released in early November only in Wal-Mart. With all the angst about the long-term decline in traditional distribution channels for music–and the propensity of…
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A Cautionary Real-Time Case Study: Cisco Remember the inventory/production debacle at Cisco in 2001? Perhaps the story got lost in the deflating of the Internet bubble, but it is worth recounting as we look at the promised and pitfalls of using real-time data to manage supply chains. Cisco bragged in the Harvard Business Review in…
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What are some opportunities for using real-time data beyond alerts and monitoring? Real-time data is being used today by a number of innovative companies to improve supply chain performance and customer satisfaction. At Toyota, for example, when you buy a new car off a dealer’s lot, they are ready to dispatch the replacement vehicle to…
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If I Get It, Can I Use It? Perhaps the major issue for professionals seeking to use real-time data in their supply chain decision processes is how to convert real-time data into real-time information. As we noted earlier, current supply chain software applications, other than visibility, are not well equipped to manage much real-time data.…
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Is Real Time the Answer or the Question? One thing is apparent in all these discussions–we probably do not have the right data to answer many of these questions. Internal enterprise information, while voluminous and correct, can often be weeks old by the time it becomes available for use in monitoring or analysis–and does not…
A VC in Vacationland 