By Chris Cookson
Can the lean supply chain get too lean? That’s a hot topic now that Toyota is suffering safety and quality woes possibly related to its supply chain. While the lean manufacturing pioneer grapples with the fallout and recovery from “unintended acceleration” and other issues, high-tech manufacturers would do well to view the troubles [...]
by Jes Lefcourt and Brian Keyser
Companies looking to develop a high-impact, enterprise-class website on a shoestring budget should consider using open source software. Open source software has provided Verical with the ability, as a small company, to create a high-quality marketplace that competes with and exceeds the offerings from our competitors with much deeper pockets. [...]
By Jes Lefcourt
The Flex programming language has yet to fully catch on in the B2B world. It should. People shopping on B2B websites increasingly expect the performance and experience they get from the B2C sites they use at home (or when the boss isn’t looking). Websites that incorporate Flex perform like a desktop-resident application. The [...]
The Economist carried an insightful article today, describing how Toyota, in its quest to become the number one car manufacturer worldwide, stretched its lean manufacturing philosophy to the breaking point. As Toyota sought to grow market share, they rapidly expanded their supply base to include suppliers they hadn’t worked with before. Along with their sole-source [...]
Do you ever wonder if the electronic components that you buy from brokers and independent distributors are legit? Where are they REALLY coming from? The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) just issued its assessment report on counterfeit electronics, which provides some interesting, albeit alarming, statistics on the degree to which counterfeit components have become integrated [...]
Check out this excellent EE Times interview with Barclays Capital analyst Tim Luke. Luke anticipates “a tight supply of memory parts in 2010 and perhaps beyond.” This article reinforces our belief that memory will soon be joining the list of hard-to-find parts turning up on buyers’ shortage lists across the world, and at the same [...]
By Josef Ruef
It turns out that purchasing agents and other corporate buyers are no more forgiving than their consumer-oriented counterparts when it comes to slow, bulky ecommerce sites. And that frustration is playing a large role in the trend to make the online shopping experience faster, more efficient, and more convenient for B2B buyers.
In the [...]
So the results are in, but who are the “real” winners and losers? I propose we change the way we measure success. We need to look deeply across the end-to-end supply chain to determine which supply chain is the strongest performer, rather than look at single entities. Sure, the retailers’ results indicate who is performing [...]
Tip 5: Seek out transparent catalog pricing
One of the most frustrating parts about shortage buying is that the more urgently the part is needed, the higher the price goes! After all the effort to locate the part they need, buyers have to haggle their way through the price negotiation. They may not have many options so a bad deal is better [...]