Tendering and Freight Marketplaces

June 21, 2009

What Happened to the Technology Initiated Freight Revolution? Lets take a walk down memory lane back to 1998-1999. i2 Technologies was the number one supply chain vendor and their management had seen fit to come out with a new concept based upon information sharing and the web called TradeMatrix. To explain all of what TradeMatrix [...]

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SAP Design for 3PL and 4PL

June 20, 2009

SAP SCM The SAP SCM suite has a number of modules that provide functionality for advanced planning and execution. This suite has many installations in finished goods manufacturers. SAP has made a number of enhancements in the past several years which address the transportation, warehousing and supply chain monitoring areas of the suite that have [...]

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Forward Stocking Location Definition

June 15, 2009

Finding the Actual Definition We recently had a discussion which involved the topic of a forward stocking location. We decided to look up this term and did not find very much about it. None of the major sites such as Wikipedia have anything more than a vague one sentence definition of it. We found no [...]

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Is UPS Actually A 4PL?

June 14, 2009

Is It True? We came upon the UPS website and found a several web pages where UPS presents its 4PL services. So we have to ask the question: Is UPS a 4PL? Well clearly, they have assets, which by definition would make them a 3PL. However, they may offer some pure information services for supply [...]

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Simple Logistics Outsourcing Not The Answer

June 10, 2009

Thinking originally or differently is very difficult for people who work in supply chain. This may have something to do with the doctrinal orientation of the education system combined with the severe hierarchy found in so many companies. Therefore, supply chain has a lot of technology, but few original ideas, or original thinkers. There is [...]

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Deploying Web Enabled Software

May 30, 2009

How to Build Fourth Party Capability In order for fourth party logistics providers to rise, they must be careful to deploy web enabled supply chain software. Too much of the software available in the market is not properly web enabled. This includes SAP, i2 and Oracle as well as probably many others that we do [...]

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Retailers as 4PLs

May 26, 2009

Retailers have the right orientation to be 4PLs. This is because they are used to being customers of logistics services. However, only a select few retailers could ever become 4PLs. 3PL Not To Be 4PL In our previous post, we described how traditional 3PLs are not well positioned to perform in the 4PL concept because [...]

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3PL vs. 4PL

May 25, 2009

The Concern 3PL providers often complain that they dislike the term 4PL because they feel intermediaries are taking business from them and leaving them with very less business or lower down on the food chain. The Reality The fact is they are asset based and will always be asset based. Their internal incentives are focused [...]

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Fourth Party Logistics Providers

May 24, 2009

4PL is an idea whose time has come. What Is It? A fourth party logistics provider is primarily coordinator of other supply chain partners through the ownership and maintenance of information systems. This is differentiated from third party logistics providers that provide physical handling and or transportation of goods. Wave of the Future There are [...]

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The Problem SCM Event Management is Attempting to Solve

May 23, 2009

Trying to pull together groups of partners collaborating on a supply chain is more difficult than generally understood. The Problem Statement In our previous post described what SAP Event Management is. http://www.scmfocus.com/sapplanning/2009/05/22/event-management/ However, we did not provide the nitty gritty details of why it is so necessary. We found them in an interesting book on [...]

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