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flevyblog
The Flevy Blog covers Business Strategies, Business Theories, & Business Stories.
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Ask a procurement director how some specialist vendor ended up on the approved list. Quite often the true answer is that someone in the lab needed it by Friday. Pharma services, specialty chemicals, university spin-outs:… Vendor Qualification in Regulated Supply Chains: A Management Framework for Supplier Quality
For decades, industrial Supply Chains were designed around a simple rule: lowest landed cost wins. Production consolidated in a handful of giant plants, inventory was stripped out, and just-in-time flows were treated as proof of… Cost of Resilience Megatrends and Strategy
For decades, tariffs were a planning variable that Procurement and Logistics teams handled in the background. That era is over. The scale and unpredictability of recent US tariff actions, along with the legal rulings that… Tariff Resilience Triangle
For most industrial businesses, pricing used to be a periodic exercise. Costs moved gradually and annual increases followed inflation. Tariff volatility has broken that rhythm. Duties now appear, escalate, pause, and reverse with little warning,… Industrial Tariff-Driven Pricing Management
Most enterprises still manage Supply Chain costs the same way they manage the rest of the budget. They take last year’s numbers, adjust for volume and inflation, and ask each function to find a few… Zero-Based Productivity
Traditional cost-cutting programs follow a familiar rhythm. Financial pressure builds, leadership orders across-the-board budget reductions and hiring freezes, savings appear on the next quarter’s report, and within a few budget cycles the baseline quietly creeps… Zero-Based Transformation (ZBT) Implementation
Traditional cost programs still dominate most planning calendars. Leadership freezes hiring, trims travel and applies a uniform percentage cut across functions. The P&L improves for a quarter or two. Complexity then reasserts itself. Hidden work… Zero-Based Transformation (ZBT) Primer
Editor’s Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Kraljic Purchasing Portfolio Matrix & Sourcing Strategy Dashboard (Excel template). This dashboard scores every purchased item on Profit Impact and Supply Risk, classifies it automatically,… The Supply Chain Risk Radar: 4 Control Points From Sourcing Strategy to Shop-Floor Quality
Editor’s Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Executive COO Operational Performance Dashboard (Excel template). This dashboard consolidates Order Volume, On-Time Delivery, Cycle Time, and 9 other operations KPIs into a single executive… The 4-Layer Supply Chain Control Tower: From Boardroom to Warehouse Floor
Agentic AI marks the shift from AI that analyzes and predicts to AI that acts. Autonomous agents now reason, plan, and execute multi-step workflows, collaborating with one another and with people to deliver outcomes rather… The Agentic AI Adoption and Maturity Journey
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly moving beyond conversational assistance and isolated Automation. Organizations are increasingly exploring AI agents that can reason, plan, interact with enterprise systems, and execute multi-step workflows with minimal human intervention. The promise… Agentic Architecture
For decades, Supply Chain Management meant efficiency. Lean inventories, Just-in-Time (JIT) delivery, and concentrated offshore production squeezed cost out of every link, and low cost was treated as synonymous with competitiveness. Then 5 years of cascading… 3 Stages of Supply Chain Resilience