Successful stock investing strategies have long included developing a diversified portfolio of assets to reduce overall investment risk. As with mitigating risk in your investment portfolio, mitigating risk in your supply chain can be accomplished by ensuring your suppliers and their suppliers are different companies having a host of different risk profiles thus reducing your overall supply risk.

There is an ever growing focus on how to shorten lead times, reduce inventory levels and increase free flowing cash in just about every industry. One way to approach making a impact on your supply chain’s performance is to identify and evaluate where critical value added activities are taking place. Each of the value added activities are necessary in order to produce a finished product, however there is a tremendous opportunity to postpone performing the value added activities at different stages until there is a clear demand signal from the market.

The sales and operations planning process has taken various forms throughout the decades, but ultimately became standard practice for many organizations. Today’s customer-driven business environment poses new obstacles for companies, particularly in the consumer products industry, that is experiencing short product life cycles in tandem with high demand volatility.

Efficiency, is a word often associated with automation, time savings, productivity, and now Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). “Driving Efficiency” is a frequently used term in the office, usually followed up with the question; How do we achieve this? One of the technologies that is more recently seeing expansive and creative use to drive efficiency in the Supply Chain world is RFID.