East Midlands strategic distribution study

This study assesses the importance of the logistics sector to the economy of the East Midlands and provides an understanding of land requirements and demand for sites from logistics companies in the region in the short, medium and long term

The urban East Midlands in 2008

The aim of this evidence base is to highlight key challenges and build a common understanding of the performance of the urban East Midlands on a range of demographic, economic, labour market, physical and environmental indicators

Addressing business agility challenges with enterprise systems

It is clear that systems agility (i.e., having a responsive IT infrastructure that can be changed quickly to meet changing business needs) has become a critical component of organizational agility. However, skeptics continue to suggest that, despite the benefits enterprise system packages provide, they are constraining choices for firms faced with agility challenges. The reason for this skepticism is that the tight integration between different parts of the business that enables many enterprise systems\u27 benefits also increases the systems\u27 complexity, and this increased complexity, say the skeptics, increases the difficulty of changing systems when business needs change. These persistent concerns motivated us to conduct a series of interviews with business and IT managers in 15 firms to identify how they addressed, in total, 57 different business agility challenges. Our analysis suggests that when the challenges involved an enterprise system, firms were able to address a high percentage of their challenges with four options that avoid the difficulties associated with changing the complex core system: capabilities already built-in to the package but not previously used, leveraging globally consistent integrated data already available, using add-on systems available on the market that easily interfaced with the existing enterprise system, and vendor provided patches that automatically updated the code. These findings have important implications for organizations with and without enterprise system architectures

The Role of Maintenance and Facility Management in Logistics: A Literature Review

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide a literature review on the different ways of carrying out Facility Management and related topics in order to uncover that there is limited research regarding the impact of Facility Management on the logistics and operational performance of warehouses. Design/methodology/approach - Four different focus areas have been identified and for each one different methodologies and streams of research have been studied. Findings - The study underlines the importance of Facility Management for the logistics operations; therefore it supports the notion that investments aiming at preserving the status of the building and service components of warehouses are crucial. Originality/value - This paper aims to suggest to Facility Management managers that they can contribute to enhance business performance by designing effective Facility Management strategie

Business-to-business e-commerce: an innovative tool for food chain management

A supply chain is a network of facilities and distribution options that performs the functions of procurement of materials, transformation of these materials into intermediate and finished goods, and the distribution of the final goods to customers. The management of food chains, particular of fresh produce chains, need to achieve two goals: (a) create efficient physical flows of products by minimising logistics cost, and reducing lead times (b) run an effective value chain by safeguarding mutual gains for all members of the chain, building trust between suppliers and buyers and at the same time maintaining quality for end consumers. Food chain management was always at a loss for tools to leveraging its efforts on achieving value for chain members and eventually the end-consumers. Although food industry, both in USA and Europe, has experimented with various alternative solutions to this multimillion chain management, yet more can be expected. Business-to-business e-commerce (B2B) appears to be an innovative tool that meets the high standards of the industry and the potential growth. This study examines the uses of B2B in food industry to give chain management solutions. It reviews the uses of B2B and, in particular, highlights the applications of B2B by small agribusiness in order to forge their ring in food chains. It builds upon communication in supply chain. It describes contracting as an example how B2B e-commerce can advance supply activities and reports the development of a B2B olive oil supply chain application. It concludes that B2B can be a strong leverage for food chain management to achieve its goals and produce value for the members of the chain and the end consumers

An Empirical Study of Operational Performance Parity Following Enterprise System Deployment

This paper presents an empirical investigation into whether the implementation of packaged Enterprise Systems (ES) leads to parity in operational performance. Performance change and parity in operational performance are investigated in three geographically defined operating regions of a single firm. Order lead time, the elapsed time between receipt of an order and shipment to a customer, is used as a measure of operational performance. A single ES installation was deployed across all regions of the subject firm\u27s operations.Findings illustrate parity as an immediate consequence of ES deployment. However, differences in rates of performance improvement following deployment eventually result in significant (albeit smaller than pre-deployment) performance differences. An additional consequence of deployment seems to be an increased synchronization of performance across the formerly independent regions

A Few Implementation Solutions for Business Intelligence

To succeed in the context of a global and dynamic economic environment, the companies must use all the information they have, as efficiently as possible, in order to gain competitive advantages and to consolidate their position on the market. They have to respond quickly to the changes in the business environment and to adapt themselves to the market’s requirements. To achieve these goals, the companies must use modern informatics technologies for data acquiring, storing, accessing and analyzing. These technologies are to be integrated into innovative solutions, such as Business Intelligence systems, which can help managers to better control the business practices and processes, to improve the company’s performance and to conserve it’s competitive advantages.Business Intelligence, competitive advantage, OLAP, data mining, key performance indicators.

Feasibility of Warehouse Drone Adoption and Implementation

While aerial delivery drones capture headlines, the pace of adoption of drones in warehouses has shown the greatest acceleration. Warehousing constitutes 30% of the cost of logistics in the US. The rise of e-commerce, greater customer service demands of retail stores, and a shortage of skilled labor have intensified competition for efficient warehouse operations. This takes place during an era of shortening technology life cycles. This paper integrates several theoretical perspectives on technology diffusion and adoption to propose a framework to inform supply chain decision-makers on when to invest in new robotics technology

A case study of business intelligence applications for business users

This research is conducted in two parts, with the first part reviewing the standard industry approach to providing organisations with business intelligence (BI) architecture. The discussion begins with a brief history of the evolution of data warehouses and business intelligence (DW/BI) systems. The generic approach to developing a DW/BI is described and the interfaces and features of BI applications are explored as to how they support the various user roles within an organisation e.g. executive, business user and business analyst. The discussion is presented using references to the Zachman Framework. The second part of the research focuses on a case study examining an organisation's implementation of a bespoke BI solution which is supporting its business managers with decision support, reporting and analysis. Where today's business intelligence is about giving business users the tools to get the information they need out of the data warehouse and thus reducing the reliance on IT departments, the bespoke solution studied puts the reliance on IT staff to support their business intelligence requirements. The BI requirements are compared and contrasted against the features of third party BI tools to reach a conclusion as to whether they support the reporting needs of the planning group in the case study or whether their needs are so specific that a bespoke solution is the best option and thus reliance on IT departments is still necessary to support the delivery of business intelligence. The findings from the first part of the research are the view that for the successful development of BI applications the BI user's needs should be addressed from the requirements stage, and the development of BI applications should run as a parallel activity alongside the data warehouse development activities. The BI applications should be developed by BI developers who have knowledge of the business, rather than technical IT staff. This view is supported by leading DW/BI authors such Kimball et al. (2008). The research also found the needs of the BI application users can be analysed by grouping them into one of five classifications of user - Tourists, Farmers, Explorers, Miners and Operators and that different user interfaces are needed to support their needs. The case study in the second part of the research found that the implementation of the DW/BI system in SAP using SAP BEx software fails to provide planning staff with BI applications that meet with all their reporting and analysis needs and has therefore led to the development of bespoke applications. The findings suggest that this may be because the planning staff were not involved at the scoping and planning stage of developing the DW/BI. The investigations found that most of the features in the bespoke BI system could be developed using a third party solution and that they are available in the SAP family of products. The level of expertise needed to develop the features ranged from easy to technical. The adoption of a third party tool could be used to develop the reports by the BI application developers identified by Kimball et al. (2008) and provide the planning managers with an intuitive and flexible user interface that can be easily customised and maintained. It was also found that SAP BusinessObject's Crystal Reports provide a rich user interface that is easy to use to support most of the BI features