Wednesday, April 23, 2008 from 8:00am-3:15pm
at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Rogers, Arkansas

Annually the Supply Chain Center provides an educational outreach program held in conjunction with the Ozark Roundtable of the CSCMP to provide funding for student activities. This is our 7th conference.

About the Conference

The Supply Chain Management Research Center hosted a one day conference on April 23, 2008 at the Embassy Suites in Rogers, Arkansas with the Ozark Roundtable and facility sponsor, Transplace.  The theme Sourcing and New Market Development in the Global Supply Chain proved to be a crowd pleaser with over 120 attendees present. 

The morning keynote speaker Mark Holloway (pictured right), VP Logistics & Customer Service Excellence, Unilever Asia, Africa Middle East Turkey made the trek from Taiwan to Northwest Arkansas to share his many supply chain experiences throughout the Asian and African continents.  Mark opened the conference by emphasizing the importance of basics companies must pursue in a global market driven by value.  Value can be unique to individual countries and may require something as simple as package size or demand something such as a total product reform. Value is defined by the customer and global supply chains professionals are challenged to deliver this value sometimes in vary unique ways.  Mark left the audience with a key thought, “Knowing what to do is not the challenge; the biggest challenge is how to make service excellence stick.”

The morning panel Supply Chain Strategies for New & Evolving Market Development featured Bill Shotwell, Director Global Supply Chain, Nestlé USA as the moderator with panelists:

• Thep Ung, Director, Inter-Market Business Group, Nestlé Purina PetCare
• Andres Lopez, Director Customer Logistics, Johnson & Johnson
• Juan Carlos Parada, Director Customer Logistics, Procter & Gamble
• Ray Sander, International Supply Chain Development Manager, Kimberly-Clark

Together they discussed a host of issues ranging from the realities that global firms must establish reasonable growth, revenue, and profits to reflect the differing government, legal, environmental, quality, and safety issues found in many regions and often individual countries.  For example: Does it make sense to source domestic or from an adjacent country or from half way across the globe?  Many companies enter a new country market with their own reality: this product sold well in North America and/or Europe therefore it will sell well in this new market.  Firms must face reality of what’s available (what can people afford) vs. a comfortable level acquired from past experiences.   What are relevant saleable unit sizes, transportation options, individual or case pack sizes for the country, distribution options, currency or credit and so on.  A top selling shampoo in the U.S. requires a significantly different supply chain in a country where the average individual income is $2 per day and the primary road infrastructure is two lanes paved with bicycle merchants using the same right of way as a truck.

Jeff Langenfeld (pictured left), Vice President of Merchandise Replenishment from Wal-Mart kicked off our afternoon discussion with a presentation discussing the movement of products into the U.S. logistics channel and numerous challenges including cycle times, store in stocks and other critical success issues inside the global sourcing supply chain at Wal-Mart.  Jeff discussed the ability to anticipate the retail environment months ahead of time and the importance of proper planning, forecasting and execution to deliver the right products into stores at the correct time and in sufficient quantities.  Choosing the right suppliers, both the materials and service providers were emphasized as critical success factors.

The afternoon panel Third Party Logistics Providers:  A Strategy for New Markets was moderated by Ken Boyd, Director Global Supply Chain Development at Kimberly-Clark and included:

• Dan Wall, Senior Vice President, Expeditors Ocean Services
• Jeremy Haycock, President, Maersk Logistics Inc.
• Bill Goodgion, Managing Director North American Transportation & Distribution Services, FedEx Trade Networks Transport & Brokerage, Inc.
• Kevin Higgins, Vice President International Logistics, Transplace
• Rob Kusiciel, Vice President Logistics, Wal-Mart

Together the panelists identified for the audience the service expectations customers should expect from various service providers and the advantages of utilizing third parties in the global network.  Among the key points, many third parties have a global presence in markets their customers are just entering into and will provide significant insights that often take time and resources to otherwise acquire.  Services ranged from cargo consolidations at ports to product qualification at the foreign manufacturing facility with complete export clearance and import clearance and transportation to the U. S. customers retail location, often with warehousing and inventory management capabilities.  In effect the third party takes on the role of an invisible global partner in the customers supply chain network.