Critical Issues Manufacturing/Supply Chain

A Qurius White Paper (August 2012)

Distributors today often find their margins squeezed from all sides. While customers expect their orders to be filled faster and more accurately than ever before, a low price continues to be a primary decision factor.

By Alexander Renz, Director of Product Management, Infor.

High Tech is most probably the most dynamic industry to be in. Over the last few years, firms have had to deal with volatile demand as consumers preferences have rapidly changed in view of innovative products and services.

European privacy rules, multi-country business processes, the euro crisis and a lingering recession will conspire to delay Cloud computing adoption in Europe by at least two years when compared to the US, according to Gartner, Inc.

The manufacturing sector is benefiting from a more supportive environment. Over the past three years there has been a slow but steady decrease in the number of administrations.

According to KPMG, mobile payments are set to reach £591 billion by 2015. Businesses have been quick to respond with Google Wallet, Barclays' Pingit and PayPal's InStore app coming into the fore.

The recent prolonged and widespread power failures suffered in Northern India have highlighted the potential exposures to businesses which rely on offshore outsourcing to deliver key services to their customers worldwide.

Oracle has announced the results of its "From Overload to Impact: An Industry Scorecard on Big Data Business Challenges" report, which surveyed 333 C-level executives from US and Canadian executives from retail and 10 other industries to determine the pain points they face regarding managing the deluge of data coming into their organisations and how well they are using that information to drive profit and growth.

A Qurius white paper

The rise and availability of computing power, coupled with the minimal cost of mass data storage, has created some fantastic opportunities for business, science and society as a whole. This Qurius white paper looks at what effect this increase in data storage has on distribution businesses and investigates how to embrace, exploit and profit from it.

By Raghu Das, CEO, IDTechEx. The latest RFID market research from IDTechEx finds that in 2012 the value of the entire RFID market will be $7.46 billion, up from $6.37 billion in 2011.

By Steve Howells, EU VP Merchandise Visibility at Checkpoint Systems.

Some were surprised when Amazon acquired Kiva Systems for 775 million dollars earlier this year. For those in the logistics industry, however, the huge value placed on the warehouse robot system is a positive sign and doesn't come as a complete shock.