It was great seeing many of you at the U Connect 2011 Conference this week. It’s good to see that attendance is growing a bit more over the years. I think that it’s important for companies to be in tuned to what is going on with Supply Chain Management these days and how issues with a given supply chain are being addressed through process change or through use of technology. I bring up U Connect because of some of the things that I’ve learned while attending the conference.

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When buying organizations negotiate business terms and conditions with their suppliers, one of the areas discussed is the coordination, ownership and payment of freight. There are varying types of freight terms such as Collect, Prepaid, Prepaid and Chargeback or Collect and Allowed. The Collect part of the Freight terms indicates that the buyer is responsible for the coordination and payment of the shipping charges for the merchandise. Prepaid indicates that the seller is responsible. Read more...

With the economy still struggling, retailers continue to postpone investing in new store openings. However they are investing in new systems, upgrading existing ones, or are implementing new processes to help manage the current business more effectively. System changes or new implementations mean massive interface changes between the new systems and existing ones. Many companies hire contractors to manage this spike in IT needs where others take the opportunity to join the "cloud computing" wave and look to outsourcing processes instead of managing the change/upgrade.

 

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