Cardinal Health steps in as Prime Therapeutics’ primary supplier

Cardinal Health Inc. has taken over as the primary pharmaceutical supplier for a Minnesota company that serves nearly 15 million people nationwide.

Dublin-based Cardinal said it struck a three-year deal with Prime Therapeutics, a St. Paul-based pharmacy benefits manager. Through the deal, terms for which the companies didn’t disclose, Cardinal will be primarily supplying two Prime facilities in Irving, Texas, and Albuquerque, N.M., that serve the company’s mail-order consumers.

Sheila Thelemann, a Prime spokeswoman, declined to dislose the name of the distributor it cut ties with, but said it made the switch to gain access to a wider range of generic pharmaceuticals and receive quicker delivery.

Prime provides pharmaceutical benefits for about 14.6 million people through Blue Cross and Blue Shield, employer, union and third-party plans. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Ohio isn’t among Prime’s clients, Thelemann said.

Tara Schumacher, a Cardinal spokeswoman, said Prime is in line for additional supply-chain services as well. Details are still being finalized, but Schumacher said Cardinal often works with facilities such as Prime’s mail-order centers to streamline ordering and receiving processes.

“Once the medication gets through the door, we’re trying to remove as many steps as possible,” Schumacher said. “If they can be more efficient, they drive costs out.”

Cardinal Health (NYSE:CAH), the largest publicly traded corporation in the state, recorded a $1.9 billion profit on $86.9 billion in revenue in fiscal 2007 ended June 30. The company employs about 43,000 worldwide.

Prime employs about 1,600 and managed more than $8.2 billion in prescription drug spending last year. The company declined to disclose annual revenue.

Source-bizjournals.com

CDC Software's Respond Product Line Delivers First Half 2008 License Sales that Exceed all of 2007

CDC Software, a wholly-owned subsidiary of CDC Corporation and a provider of industry-specific enterprise software and services, today announced its CDC Respond product line, a suite of enterprise complaint and feedback management solutions, has demonstrated an approximate 62 percent increase in license revenue growth for the first half of 2008 compared to the same period a year earlier and a 133 percent increase in license sales for the second quarter of 2008 compared to the same quarter last year.

For the first half of 2008, 54 percent of the license revenue for CDC Respond was generated from new customers and 46 percent from existing customers. Of that license revenue, 44 percent of customers were from the financial services sector, 25 percent from the government sector with the remainder coming from the utilities and general business sectors. Over the last several quarters, CDC Respond has generated new business with both new and existing customers including: Telford & Wrekin Council and Essex County Council, both of whom are United Kingdom government organizations, United Utilities, a U.K. utility, and a leading United States-based bank, which represents a seven figure transaction and the largest CDC Respond sales deal to-date.

Since CDC Software acquired Respond Group in February 2007, several new CDC Respond products have been launched and CDC Respond has seen a rapid growth in sales. "We believe that this growth trend is primarily a result of market conditions forcing organizations to use customer retention and customer service as competitive differentiators," said James Heavey, president, CDC Respond product line, CDC Software.

"The success of CDC Respond shows there is robust opportunities in the enterprise complaints management market," according to Andy Hayler, Bloor Research. "The new products demonstrate ongoing innovation and the impressive customer case studies, including a major U.K. retail bank deployment of 32,000 licenses worldwide, suggest CDC Respond is headed for continued success."

"We are very pleased to see such strong organic growth for CDC Respond with the first half license sales for 2008 exceeding the whole year of 2007," said Bruce Cameron, executive vice president, Worldwide Sales and Marketing, CDC Software. "In a slower economy, companies are looking at innovative technology solutions such as CDC Respond to help them increase customer satisfaction and retention. We believe that CDC Respond is strategically well positioned as a leading solution provider in this space. We have and are continuing to see strong traction and our second half pipeline reflects this. We want to build on the strong momentum we generated over the last few quarters, including record license sales in the United States and United Kingdom, including a multi-million dollar transaction with a leading commercial bank in the United States."
Source-marketwatch.com

Supply chain management software set to top the sales charts

Software industry experts are predicting that supply chain management software will generate a staggering £4 billion of sales by 2010, which would make it one of the world’s most widely bought global business specialist applications.

Supply chain management software has proved extremely popular over the last 30 years with businesses that operate in time and cost conscious production and distribution environments. As with most cutting-edge technologies, supply chain management software functionality has undergone exponential advances, especially in the last five years which have allowed it to keep pace with an ever-changing business world.

It is the adaptive nature of the software and its ability to drive successful businesses that will propel supply chain management software to the top of the software sales charts. At the outset, early systems focused purely on transactions, but it wasn’t until the recent advent of client server technology that supply chain management systems could be more easily understood and accepted by users.

Organisations are increasingly operating across a number of time zones on different continents, and as well as the geographical and cultural challenges faced, there is the added problem of multiple distribution channels. With greater emphasis placed on empowerment of users through access to information, supply chain executives have added pressure piled on them to ensure that they embrace globalisation, battle obsolescence and also to contain costs, in addition to their day job!

The trials and tribulations of supply chain executives make them aggressive when demanding improvements to software. They want something that can do all the above and make sure they can control inventory and suppliers, and supply chain management software companies are more than happy to oblige. They are quick to adopt new technologies in their quest for the perfect supply chain management software and have naturally embraced the web in their designs.

Indeed, the internet acts as a superb connectivity tool for supply chain management software. A whole suite of collaborative programs for the entire supply chain can be operated over the web, which impacts positively on forecasting and planning while providing a transparent view of the performance measures.

Today’s advanced systems can bring together a huge number of suppliers at the click of a mouse, using XML web services and trading portals, and have certainly come a long way from the primitive EDI systems of the 1970s. But, possibly the biggest difference between today’s successful supply chain management systems and their forerunners is the impact they have in helping workers make decisions.

That is the true value of any successful system, allowing the business to keep the supply chain in perfectly efficient working order while providing many opportunities to control increasingly diverse supplier relationships and inventory portfolios. For as long as there are companies operating in aggressively competitive markets, the future looks bright for sales of supply chain management software.

Disclaimer: Matthew Pressman writes for a wide variety of commercial clients. This article is intended for information purposes only and readers should seek additional information before taking any actions based on its content.

Source-bestsyndication.com

New BSR Report Outlines Lessons on Building Supply Chain Capacity for CSR

While many companies concerned about corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues in their supply chain tend to focus on monitoring factory conditions, a new report by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) reveals that companies working directly with factory managers to equip suppliers with skills, knowledge and systems to take ownership of CSR issues are more effective in addressing persistent issues such as labor standards violations, environmental degradation, and poor health and safety protections.

BSR's "Pilot Summary Report: Building Capabilities to Implement CSR Management Systems at ICT Suppliers in China" is based on a series of recently completed pilot projects aimed at breaking through common barriers to improving factory conditions. Organizations in this collaborative project include BSR, the World Bank Group’s investment climate advisory service, the Foreign Investment Advisory Service (FIAS), the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC), the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) and the Shenzhen Electronics Industry Association (SEIA). In 2007, the collaboration published a report identifying the root causes of poor factory conditions, and providing recommendations for how customers, suppliers, government and civil society can all contribute to improved capacity among factories in China.

Based on findings from these reports and the recent pilot projects, there are several steps companies can take to build capacity in their supply chains:

• Support multiple capacity-building strategies. Approaches can include providing generic tools (such as a factory committee or worker hotline to address concerns), conducting trainings, creating supplier-support networks and implementing factory-specific projects.
  
  
• Focus on the business case. To achieve buy-in from suppliers, identify real incentives and allow supplies to shape their own approach to CSR improvements within the factory.
  
  
• Integrate a mentoring system into the monitoring process. Work with the supplier to identify root causes of compliance issues. This strengthens the relationship between the company and the supplier, shifting focus from immediate compliance to continuous improvement.
  
  
• Foster ongoing dialogue among stakeholders. These include customers, suppliers, NGOs, local government and industry associations. This reinforces each group’s efforts, creating the potential for a much bigger impact on everyone’s CSR efforts.

Moving forward, BSR will apply these lessons to other industries and countries. "The challenges with capability building identified in these reports are not unique to the ICT sector or to China, and many of the recommendations can be applied to a wide variety of sectors and geographies," said Laura Commike Gitman, BSR Director, Advisory Services. "The project partners look forward to building on these lessons to help focus future capability-building efforts."

For more information about BSR's work in this partnership, please contact Laura Commike Gitman at lgitman@bsr.org.



About BSR
Since 1992, Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) has been providing socially responsible business solutions to many of the world’s leading corporations. Headquartered in San Francisco and with offices in Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, New York and Paris, BSR is a nonprofit business association that serves its 250 member companies and other Global 1000 enterprises. Through advisory services, convenings and research, BSR works with corporations and concerned stakeholders of all types to create a more just and sustainable global economy. For more information, visit www.bsr.org.

About the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition
The EICC consists of 30 companies that have come together in their common interest to improve working conditions and environmental stewardship throughout the electronics supply chain. This group supports a common code of conduct for electronics companies, the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct. The code covers expectations for performance across a range of issues, including labor, health and safety, environmental practices, ethics and management systems. Through its board, steering committee and working groups, the group is working to implement the code of conduct, engaging with stakeholders and keeping the code up to date. For more information, visit www.eicc.info.

About the Global e-Sustainability Initiative
GeSI is a joint initiative of an international group of ICT service providers and suppliers, industry associations, the Carbon Disclosure Project and WWF, with the support of the United Nations Environment Programme and International Telecommunication Union. GeSI seeks to contribute to sustainable development in the ICT industry by taking a leadership role in collaborative exploration and responsible management of the evolving interfaces among industrial, ecological and social systems. The EICC and GeSI are working together on development and deployment of a consistent set of tools and processes to measure, monitor and improve supply chain corporate responsibility performance across the ICT sector. Information about GeSI members and ongoing activities can be found at www.gesi.org.
Source-csrwire.com

Supply Chain:Warehouse Management System (WMS)

SUCCEEDING IN today’s competitive environment requires warehouses to guarantee customer and supplier satisfaction by providing accurate and profitable warehouse processes associated with productivity. Outdated software applications, poor system integration, and bad accounting inventory tracking solutions can result in a lack of inventory visibility and control. These challenges can prevent warehouse operators from increasing their profitability within and beyond the four walls of a location or multiple warehouses.

WMS BENEFITS:

Increase customer satisfaction, improve employee productivity, eliminate paperwork, data entry, remove IT headache, eliminate maintenance and upgrade costs, reduce inventory costs, automate warehouse operations, avoid stock-outs centralise visibility, compatible with wireless technology, gain immediate ReturnOnInvestment (ROI), complete back-office integration.

Warehouse Management System (WMS) helps warehouses consolidate and manage all inbound purchase orders across departments through one centralised system to streamline the “procure-to-pay” or “procure to receipt” purchase process. By centrally managing these purchasing processes, warehouse accounting can improve productivity and eliminate duplicate data-entry.

Integrating business processes from the back office to the warehouse floor helps streamline the receiving and put-away process by tying receipts to inbound orders. Within the inbound order process, the WMS solution also sources available suppliers from historical perform and based rating system generates customised purchasing and supplier reports automates receiving against inbound orders eliminates paper-based purchasing to lower costs reconciles orders against errors or short shipments.

Keep customer commitments with error-free order fulfillment WMS offers the ability to maximise the productivity of a company’s sales and warehouse staff by providing a centralised system to manage the flow of inventory from sales order, to pick, to ship, to invoice.

With WMS, both sales and warehouse operators effectively manage and access the same accurate customer data to fulfill orders quickly and accurately while shortening lead times. WMS also allows sales and warehouse operators to check real-time, accurate product availability during order fulfillment through integrated inventory control generate pick tickets and shipping documents directly from the sales order gain process efficiency with picking rules view sales order and shipment status from a central view.

Inherent value in on-demand software on-demand architecture enables warehouses to quickly deploy and integrate with front-office an back-office operations. As a managed service, there is no hardware to buy, no software to install, no network to set-up and no technical staff to maintain. As a result, warehouse operators don’t have to worry about system deployments, performance, reliability or upgrades It’s WMS worry not yours.

WMS is an affordable solution that grows with you. Warehouses can easily add users, additional warehouses or SKUs with simple and easy-to-use configuration settings. Delivered over the Internet, WMS is more cost-effective then traditional software solutions and provides users with an intuitive interface to help increase employee adoption.

WMS solution:
Eliminates IT headaches, improves reliability and scalability provides real-time information and integrates easily with computer hardware.

Source-merinews.com

Managing the Global Supply Chain

The global supply chain is a vital part of modern business. Presenting a global view of the scope and complexity of supply chain management, this book reflects the rapid change that has taken place within the supply chain and its environment.

Schary and Skjøtt-Larsen have fully updated their successful first edition, giving readers of this new edition an insightful overview of the conceptual foundations of the global supply chain. The book has been completely reorganized toward a customer orientation and rewritten to include the new changes in technology and practice.

'Managing the Global Supply Chain' is based on three parallel elements: structure, process and organization to build a supply network that includes distribution, production and procurement within one integral system. It moves beyond concepts from business logistics to emphasize inter-organizational networks and the strategic role of the supply chain in corporate strategy. A separate section on management and strategy examines organizational forms and management tools.


Source : www.cbspress.dk

Trade Policy Likely to be Key Issue in Presidential Election – with Potentially Large Impact for US Manufacturers

As is common during almost any slow economy, the issue of trade policy and lost jobs due to “offshoring” is once again being elevated, exacerbated by this being a presidential election year and an undeniable acceleration in recent years of companies moving production from the US to China or other low cost countries.

Not since Ross Perot memorably described the “great sucking sound” he anticipated from the then proposed NAFTA accord during the 1992 presidential race has trade policy had such a high profile.

It is unclear exactly how US policies might be changed under an Obama administration, but the impact potentially could be significant for US manufacturers in any number of ways:

• Changes to existing trade policies that will make it more costly to source product from low-cost countries, making some moves offshore impossible or a poor financial decision. That might keep some jobs in the US, but increase costs for business and consumers.
• Protection in part for some US manufacturers from global competition.
• Potential retaliatory moves by US trading partners that might put a crimp on currently surging US export volumes and, according to some, lower overall world GDP growth.

In general, Republican John McCain is for continuing existing free trade policies. Democrat Obama has been critical of arrangements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), saying it needs to be amended to be more supportive of US interests – but offering little additional specifics on what changes he would propose. One Obama economic advisor reportedly told Canadian officials this spring that the NAFTA talk was just political rhetoric, and wouldn’t result in significant policy changes in practice.

Obama has said he would extend the Trade Adjustment Assistance program – which right now only provides assistance to manufacturing workers that lose jobs due to trade policies, to service workers, such as IT personnel that lose jobs when computer work is sent offshore. He has also said he would end tax breaks and other subsidies to companies that send jobs overseas, and take unclear action, such as tariffs, in cases where foreign governments provide subsidies to their manufacturers, enabling them to sell at lower prices or make more investments.

Source by scdigest.com

Integration Point Expands Presence in Asia

Global Trade Management Software Provider Continues Successful Growth

Integration Point, a provider of real time global trade management solutions, announced its expanded Asian presence with the opening of a new office in Gujarat, India. Integration Point is conducting this expansion in response to the continued market growth in the Asia region.

Integration Point provides a web-based Global Trade Management (GTM) system which allows users to securely access up-to-date global trade content, compliance and connectivity at each point of the supply chain transaction. By integrating critical information from otherwise separate systems such as logistics, ERP, warehouse management and local country databases, Integration Point creates a global trade network connecting multiple members of the trade community electronically to regulatory agencies around the world.

“Web-based Global Trade Management technologies provide a lot of potential to help companies improve efficiency and reduce costs in the global supply chain,” noted Integration Point’s Senior VP of Global Markets, Clay Perry. “There is a clear increase in the demand for our products in Asia, and we are responding to that demand with an increased local presence.”

About Integration Point, Inc.

Integration Point®, Inc.’s Real Time Global Trade Management helps many of the best known companies import and export goods more effectively by providing up-to-date international trade compliance. Integration Point’s solution is a comprehensive suite of fully integrated, web-based software products that provide consistent and secure access to information around the clock including: Import/Export Management, Global Classification, C-TPAT, AEO, Denied Party Screening, Free Trade Agreement qualification and Duty Deferral Program participation. Companies dependent on efficient import/export of goods rely on Integration Point to help them quickly and accurately navigate through the often complex and dynamic requirements of global trade. Contact Integration Point at www.IntegrationPoint.net or 704-576-3678.