Quelle: CIO, Kanada

When AmazonAmazon.ca needed to speed the newest Harry Potter book to thousands of eagerly awaiting Canadian "muggles" (folks without magical powers), it used a little magic of its own - supply chain magic, that is. Alles zu Amazon auf CIO.de

Deliveries of tens of thousands of copies of 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' were made in some 40 cities across the country, including 21 major urban centres, using more than 40 ground transportation routes and a dozen scheduled flights. The feat called for the systematic application of best practices to one of the biggest logistics challenges of the year.

"To excel at logistics, everything you do has to be geared toward speed, flexibility and efficiency," says Ann Nelson, CIO of Progistix Solutions Inc, the logistics services company whose subsidiary, Assured Logistics Inc, helped Amazon.ca pull the logistics rabbit out of the hat. "It's not just a question of having clean, clear processes or using world-class technology; you also need to have visibility to the right information and put strong, comprehensive metrics in place. When you measure and monitor proactively, you can catch and fix problems quickly before they impact supply chain performance."

Leveraging an infrastructure that includes integrated processes across the end-to-end order and inventory management cycle, Nelson's firm can fulfill and deliver orders within 30 minutes in selected urban centres, helping drive costs off the customer's balance sheet and income statement. Most achieve inventory savings in the order of 20per cent, at least on average.

Managing supply chain complexity

Third-party logistics providers don't have to get logistics right just once, for one particular company's specific supply chain; they have to do it day in and day out for a number of very different businesses, small and large.