Regenia: Well, the name of the game right now is end-to-end visibility. What we’re seeing is a lot of investment in digital and analytics in order to increase the visibility across the end-to-end supply chain. In the past, we really optimized within silos across the supply chain, so working with suppliers, working with inventory, looking at our fulfillment network. Now, we want to be able to look across the end-to-end, so that when something changes, or there is a disruption, or there is increased demand, we know how the ripple effect is going to happen across the whole supply chain. This enables companies to be more responsive, it allows them to be more agile and meet the ultimate goal, which is to achieve the customer commit dates that they’ve committed to.
I’m working with a couple of companies right now in the automotive space – spare parts, being able to identify what location they should be holding the inventory that’s closest to the biggest customer concentration, and this is something that we’re helping them to implement a technology to do. In addition to that, we’re also challenging their operating model. In the past, they might have only had one regional distribution center in a central location in the US, but now they want to be able to diversify that network’s portfolio a bit more and have DC’s on the West Coast, on the East Coast, in addition to the central part of the US, so that they can maximize trade lanes, they can maybe minimize costs because they’re going to be closer to their greatest customer concentrations. It enables them to direct and redirect inventory as needed when there are changes and disruptions that take place.
Del: Yep. It’s really sounds like they’ve got to be responsive and agile. Thanks, Regenia. This is Real Time Business.