How alternative financing can help stabilize supply chains | Hy-Vee looks to meal solutions to serve customers | Lineage opens facility near Port of Savannah to process produce
"Access to goods and management of cost" amid inflation are two challenges that buyers and suppliers face as they seek supply chain stability, says Maureen Sullivan, supply chain finance chief for MUFG. Companies will need to collaborate, and many are turning to financing programs that allow buyers to "provide an alternative source of liquidity" for their critical suppliers, Sullivan says.
Hy-Vee is continuing to invest in its food halls, Market Grille Express and Fast & Fresh convenience store concepts to cater to changing consumer habits. "Seventy percent of our customers say they have no idea what they are going to make for dinner at four o'clock," said Ryan Roberts, executive vice president for perishables. "So our concept of our food halls is really to provide very high quality products and a wide variety."
A new 220,000-square-foot Lineage Logistics facility near the Port of Savannah will be able to process as much as 1.4 million pounds of produce on a daily basis. The $78 million project is meant to address the difficulty that Mid-Atlantic ports are having in keeping up with the influx of produce imports.
The Canadian Pacific Kansas City railroad has reached an agreement with Schneider National to start handling the trucking company's rail shipments between Mexico and Chicago next month. The railroad company is planning to increase track capacity in Laredo, Texas, where a bridge crossing expansion is expected to be completed by the end of 2024.
Considering overall business objectives is a must when deciding whether to plunge into artificial intelligence or machine learning, writes Moses Guttmann, CEO of ClearML. It's also necessary to examine governance procedures, including risk management and compliance, Guttmann points out.
In this podcast, John Arnold and Lisa Gately, principal analysts at Forrester, explain the concept of lifecycle revenue marketing and how it solves business-to-business marketing problems, such as misalignment with sales and a disproportionate focus on customer acquisition. The strategy involves all B2B teams "connecting their programs, whether it's demand or customer engagement … to the full lifecycle of revenue opportunities, so beyond acquisition to retention, cross-sell, and upsell," Gately says.
Two reintroduced bipartisan bills will help the consumer packaged goods industry meet packaging goals by increasing higher-quality recycled content and data on recycling and composting rates, shared John Hewitt, vice president of packaging sustainability for the Consumer Brands Association. The pieces of legislation include "crucial investments and add the tools and resources needed to improve our current recycling systems and evaluate future recycling policies, while improving access to recycling systems in underserved communities," said Hewitt.
Leaders can help their companies ride out an economic recession by staying focused on core customers, innovating for the long-term but trying experiments that might yield quick returns and investing in your people and assets, writes Hubert Palan, the founder and CEO of Productboard. "It's not just about investing in the next shiny new thing but rather accurately anticipating what's next and which pain point is likely to endure," Palan writes.
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