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Image Source: Jonathan Laurence In 2013, Iceland’s oldest shipping company, Eimskip, moved the company’s North American port of call from Norfolk, Virginia, to Portland, Maine. “Eimskip’s move to Portland was driven by the state’s commitment to investing in intermodal...
Supply chain management is more than just a series of transactions; it is a valuable, strategic business process. Change is inevitable, and, in healthcare supply chain, it is crucial. The most progressive healthcare organizations across the country now acknowledge...
A good call to action will help potential leads feel compelled to choose your offer over your competitors’ offers. If you feel your marketing campaign falls short in generating quality leads, you are not alone. Typically one in 10 marketing professionals questions...
Identifying content spokespeople outside of executive management can improve the product and alleviate C-suite stress. Often people think they’re the only ones who can do their job or, at the very least, that they’re the ones who have been doing it and know it best....
Enticing potential customers with exclusive, high-value offers is an important component of lead nurturing and lead generation. Your strategic marketing objectives boil down to one basic mission: to generate a high volume of quality leads. This will drive tomorrow’s...
When it comes to leading during difficult times in the supply chain, planning is critical. So is flexibility. Winter storm Jonas is estimated to have cost $1 billion USD, although some believe the cost could go as high as $3 billion USD, as it paralyzed a large swath...
A blog can live on indefinitely. What you post today may still be relevant and a popular read several months from now. Because of this, your company can reach a larger number of consumers within its target demographic for a long period of time, surpassing a print ad’s capacity for results.
Amazon continues to expand its logistics infrastructure to support its shipping and delivery services. Recent moves could also suggest that the company has long-term plans to operate as a 3PL, shaking up the global logistics market.
Reverse logistics presents unique challenges and opportunities. To meet these challenges and take advantage of these opportunities, companies need to be both prepared and flexible. Ikea, a company known for innovation, is facing the enigma of reverse logistics head...
Fronetics Strategic Advisors has conducted a survey to discover the top logistics and supply chain blogs for 2016. Find out which companies were voted the top three blogs.
Should employers monitor or censor employees’ social media accounts? Millennials are used to posting without thought, so it is best for companies to have a social media policy in place just in case.
Manufacturing and the supply chain are male-dominated industries, but companies with a diverse workforce and women leadership perform better. It’s time for these industries to seek opportunities to close the gender gap.
With the LinkedIn Mobile App, you can grow your marketing program from your phone. Find out how you should be using the app to help your marketing efforts.
Companies with a documented content marketing strategy find their efforts significantly more successful than those without a strategy in place. Download this eBook to get started on developing your customized content marketing strategy.
The supply chain will certainly be affected by the outcomes from the Paris Climate Agreement, so companies should begin to consider several factors when planning for the future.
Content marketing can be a wildly successful strategy for B2B marketers. Get the most out of your content marketing strategy in 2016 by following these six tips.
Fronetics Strategic Advisors is a leading management consulting firm. We advise and work with companies on their most critical issues and opportunities: strategy, marketing, organization, talent acquisition, performance management, and M&A support. We've gathered...
Some believe that the collaborative economy is the biggest game-changer in the business sector since the Internet. You might ask, exactly what is a collaborative economy? Researchers Alexandra Samuel and Jeremiah Owyang define the term in their informative, 28-page...
Recruiting and retaining top talent is one of the largest issues the supply chain faces today. Fronetics counts down the top talent articles of 2015.
Over the past year we have helped many clients both develop and execute social media strategies. We have also disseminated information on how companies can use social media as an effective business tool. Here are the top 10 social media articles from 2015: 1. 25 Ways...
Last year was big for content marketing within the logistics and supply chain industries. Fronetics Strategic Advisors counts down the top 10 content marketing articles from 2015.
Fronetics Strategic Advisors is a leading management consulting firm focused on the logistics and supply chain industries. Our industry and functional expertise enables us to fully support and guide our clients as they address critical business issues, take...
Fronetics Strategic Advisors is a leading management consulting firm. We work with organizations to identify and execute strategies for growth and value creation. Good leadership is invaluable. At Fronetics we offer: leadership solutions for organizations during...
Fronetics is, once again, looking to uncover the top industry blog of 2015. We need your help by voting for your favorite blog in the logistics and supply chain industries.
Apple has been making lives easier for years with its personal electronics devices, and its new step towards security will bring relief to many people and, in the age of BYOD (bring your own device) many businesses with be grateful. An increase in two digits, from...
Recently a friend left her job for a new job that offered more money, a better title, and exciting work. She spent much of the last days at her job feeling excited about her new prospect, but something in her was unsettled. She had spent much of the last decade at her...
We all want to see the fruits of our labors. Whether launching a product or a new social media campaign, we look for instantaneous numbers that will affirm we made the right choices. But here’s the problem: not all metrics are created equal. So-called vanity metrics...
3 things supply chain hiring managers should look for when hiring a copywriter. Since 94% of domestic B2B buyers conduct research online to make purchase decisions, maintaining high-quality content on your company’s website is crucial for attracting new business. But...
In mid-October, LinkedIn made some big changes: LinkedIn Groups are private and there’s a new, standalone LinkedIn Groups app for iOS users. Many LinkedIn Groups were used for the purpose of networking, research, and prospecting, however many people were misusing, and...
We know that with the increasing growth of cyber-hacking and data breaches, investing in IT asset disposition (ITAD) is a growing necessity for companies. It is critical to ensure the safety of a company’s confidential live and stored data on all of its assets,...
When it comes to IT Asset Disposal here are 5 must-ask questions for third-party providers. When the industry thinks of data breaches it raises the specter of a savvy hacker lurking very far, and yet very close, intermingling with a larger organization of internet...
As the new year approaches, don’t overlook the valuable information you can glean from conducting a year-end review. Don’t start the new year without asking these 4 essential questions. What were my biggest accomplishments this year? Twelve months can seem like a long...
With 3 out of 4 marketers across the globe prioritizing content marketing, producing unique content to attract and convert website visitors can be tough. From social media to blog posts to ebooks and webinars, buyers are accessing your content through a myriad of...
Do we need to rethink the concept of happiness at work? Do you like your job? It can be a complex question to answer when everything is taken into account. For some people that question is comprised of several other questions, many of which have different answers: If...
If you watch enough romantic comedies, you’ll start to recognize a pattern. It goes something like this: Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. Movie follows antics of girl + boy, winding its way through the (oftentimes hairy) narrative. Throughout the movie we see the main...
It’s common to think of the people who work for a company as “employees”, but reframing language and thinking could be critical to your supply chain. Start considering your employees as “talent”. The word employee has the connotation of working for someone or under...
It seems to me that Halloween merchandise is on display in stores and online earlier and earlier every year. A spokesperson for the National Retail Federation (NRF) last month confirmed this when she pointed to a spike in consumer Halloween spending in recent years....
Consumers are using social media to help them make purchase decisions. An infographic by Invesp provides key details including that: 4 in 10 social media users have purchased an item online or in-store after sharing it or marking it as a favorite on Twitter,...
A study conducted by Accenture found that supply chain risk management is seen by companies as a priority. Seventy-six percent of companies who participated in the survey described supply chain risk management as important or very important, and 25 percent of...
Imagine for a moment you’re entering an electronics retailer, ready to purchase a new television. You’ve been thinking about buying a new TV for a while, so you’ve done your homework. You know the difference between LCD and plasma. You’re certain that a 50 inch flat...
There are organizations that sell products and there are organizations that sell solutions. To be sure, both can be successful as long as products are being sold as products and solutions like solutions. The difference is that the product sale is really a commodity...
Hiring someone who says he or she is not a team player sounds like a risky proposition, right? Few employers are, after all, searching for renegade employees or stubborn loners who refuse to interact with co-workers. But what if it actually turned out to be a good...
I wrote previously about the opportunities companies within the logistics and supply chain industries can realize through social listening. I cautioned that to reap the benefits and seize the opportunities afforded by social media, companies need to use the...
Companies within the logistics and supply chain industries have been slower to participate in social media than other industries. The primary reason being because of a lack of understanding of what social media is and the role it can play for business. Unfortunately,...
On October 1st the 735-foot cargo ship El Faro issued a distress call, and then vanished in the eye of Hurricane Joaquin. The search for the ship, captain, and crew has thrust the shipping industry into the spotlight. There is a common misconception that the majority...
Around the time when the leaves start changing color every year, companies turn their focus to year-end revenue and gross profit forecasts. Those forecasts, in turn, are used to inform the establishment of sales and revenue targets for the following year. These goals...
The social economy is estimated to be $1.3 trillion U.S. dollars annually. Social media is more than a collection of personal commentary, photos, and inspirational quotes. Increasingly, social media creates an opportunity to gather information, and social media is...
Across the globe, many industries are seeing aftermarket services outperforming the general market. We can point to many reasons for this occurrence: the tendency for aftermarket services to remain stable in trying times, buyers remaining flush with cash, competition...
Landing pages are a fundamental tool in converting website visitors into leads. They’re what convince your visitors that they absolutely must download your fabulous resource offer. Yet often times they’re treated as the annoying little sibling to high-value content...
Outsourcing isn’t new to the business world. It goes back as far as the Industrial Revolution. Before then, it was common practice for businesses to perform all functions of product and service delivery, from product manufacturing through to product delivery. Sometime...
Logistics is logistics is logistics– right? Wrong. The direction the product is moving in the supply chain – forward or backward – makes a difference. Forward logistics, or the forward supply chain, is all about getting the product to market. In contrast, reverse...
The perception of the reverse logistics industry has shifted over the last several years. Reverse logistics has gone from being viewed as an afterthought to a necessary evil to being recognized as a wealth of opportunity. This shift has occurred as a result of...
Last updated: November 18, 2024 Having a mobile-friendly website isn't just an option in 2025 — it's a necessity. With mobile devices accounting for over 60% of web traffic and search engines increasingly considering mobile-friendliness in results, supply chain...
As of January 2015 nearly half (3.01 billion) of the world’s population (7.21 billion) were active internet users. Population growth from the previous year was up 1.6%, active internet users were up 21%, and social media users were up 12%. These are big leaps, and...
While the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) concept has quickly gained traction in the business world, many companies have been slow to address its threat to their data privacy. Even for companies that have recognized the need to prioritize digital security, many have...
Personal connected devices – our laptops, cell phones, and tablets – are arguably the most complicit tools in the recent blurring of the parameters between personal and work life. And while most businesses have generally recognized the benefit of allowing employees to...
Selling certainly isn’t like it used to be. Take the requisite childhood lemonade stand, for example. Every summer thousands of entrepreneurial youths take to their neighborhood streets with pitchers of homemade lemonade to offer passers-by a cool drink for a small...
Are you ready to harness some of the $1 trillion dollars social media can bring the value chain yearly? There are over 3 billion internet users on Earth, or nearly half the world’s population. The growth of worldwide internet users from 2000- 2015 was 753%. In...
In the age of big data, everything in marketing is measureable – and that’s not necessarily a good thing. As Dimitri Maex of Ogilvy Consulting puts it, “marketers are drowning in numbers because they are focused on what they can measure rather on what they should...
The profile of marketing has definitely been raised lately. With a full 63% of businesses planning to increase their marketing budgets this year, its clear business leaders are looking directly to their marketing departments to drive growth. Along with expanding...
Multi-channel distribution is likely to fuel the demand for on-demand packaging as companies continue their search for more cost-effective solutions. Only 7% of companies are making their boxes on demand. However, that figure is set to grow quickly. The explosive rise...
Big data is, well, big. The term has gotten lots of buzz the past few years. But it’s big in other ways as well. According to McKinsey big data is defined as “datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage, and...
92% of businesses use social media as a recruitment tool – and 75% of hiring managers say they check out candidate’s social media profiles. With hiring managers and recruiters using social media to post jobs and identify great talent, it is obvious that you need to...
Many organizations that jumped on the big data bandwagon have struggled to turn their new, boundless collection of data into actionable business information. As consultant Rich Sherman of Athena IT Solutions puts it, today’s businesses are struggling with "the...
Going green in the warehouse is no longer an afterthought, but a necessity to boost the bottom line. With the US Green Building Council reporting nearly 172,000 gross square meters being certified LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) every day in the...
Content marketing has become a key marketing strategy for many businesses. Statistics show that content marketing generates three times more leads than traditional marketing methods – and those leads cost an average of 62% less. At Fronetics, we've built our content...
Image Source: University of Wisconsin - Madison In 2014 the global consumer electronic market was valued at $1,224.8 billion. Future Market Insights projects that the market will reach $2,976.1 billion by 2020, reflecting a CAGR of 15.4% during the forecast period,...
Earlier this year, when Fronetics Strategic Advisors set out to explore the role of content within the logistics and supply chain industries, a full 86% of the companies we surveyed reported using content as a marketing tool – their primary goals being to build brand...
Big data is big. Over the past two years alone more than 90% of the world’s data has been created. Each day more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. For those who are more numerically inclined that is more than 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes per day....
All executives understand the significance, for their company and for their career, of creating and implementing strategy. Because of the significance of strategy, and because strategy forces executives to confront the future, many find it scary. Savvy executives...
Understanding your financial metrics at a granular level is important in that it allows for a true understanding of what is happening, and what is not. It enables you to drill down and appreciate, for example, similarities, differences, and outliers. Being informed...
In one of the most infamous social media gaffes, the insurance giant Aflac fired its widely-recognized spokesman Gilbert Godfrey after he tweeted insensitive comments about the Japanese tsunami in 2011. The rapid growth of social media has created a gray area for...
Although our economy has rebounded since the 2008 downturn we have come to realize that the days of abundant resources are gone. Our current and future economic reality consists of scarce resources and a shrinking opportunity base. Managers face the challenge of...
With LinkedIn this month reporting a 33% year-over-year growth of revenue and a 21% increase in membership, it remains solid in its role as the primary social network for business. Data from outside the company confirm its dominance. A University of Massachusetts...
With today’s merger and acquisition (M&A) activity at the highest level since 2007, up 38% over the same period last year, there’s been a great deal of shifting lately. In the high-tech industry, analysts are following a particular trend among original equipment...
Manufacturing is experiencing a graying of its industry. With millions of workers at or near retirement age, many top posts are occupied by workers who have seen radical changes in the workplace over the course of their careers. And while executives have largely...
Being in the strategic advisory space, I get a lot of exposure to various business strategies, strategic plans, and sales plans, both internally to organizations and from outsiders looking to raise money or gain influence. When it comes to strategic planning, too...
Transportation and logistics is a field that is booming. The business is a money-maker and a cornerstone of day-to-day functioning. It’s one that has been present for centuries. We are well past the Age of Discovery, but transportation and logistics companies carry on...
Before you finalize your budget, take inventory. What do you really need? A friend recently shared a story with me. Her company had been subject to budget cuts over the past several years. Each year the question wasn't if there would be cuts, but rather how much would...
Do reverse logistics companies need to focus on content marketing? Yes. Should they use LinkedIn? Yes. Twitter? Yes. YouTube? Yes. Yes. Yes. Should they blog? Yes! Several reverse logistics companies are already using content marketing in an effort to connect with...
"A diverse organization will out-think and out-perform a homogeneous organization every single time". A. Lafley, CEO – Procter & Gamble Recent research conducted by McKinsey & Company found that when it comes to the bottom line, diversity matters....
For decades, companies have relied on the recommendations of friends and family to acquire new customers and grow sales. Social media is now transforming how these recommendations are shared and given companies a way to directly interact with customers. With more than...
In an interview with the Kitchn, Food Network’s Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten shared her top three secrets to hosting a successful dinner party – plan ahead, use your best stuff, and have fun building and sustaining relationships with those around you. Her focus may be...
Only 1 in 10 professional marketers describe their lead nurturing efforts as "highly efficient and effective." For most businesses, that's simply not good enough. We've compiled the 30 greatest lead nurturing lessons into a guide. In it, you’ll learn the secrets of...
Editor's note: This is a guest post written by David Weaver. David has spent the past several years developing a best practice online marketing strategy for the inventory and supply chain division at INFORM GmbH. Blogging has been around for years, yet some of the...
There are many companies in the supply chain that are good at what they do. However, not all companies “do well by doing good.” Here are 6 companies who are doing well by doing good: Lego: In a recent move to “significantly reduce [Lego’s] impact on the planet” the...
We are increasingly seeing the impact of climate change. We are seeing the impact in the form of drought, wildfires, hurricanes, fires, rising sea-levels, record blizzards, and high temperatures. The supply chain plays a significant role in climate change....
A “revolution” is what Pope Francis recently called it – the necessity for humans to change attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in order create a sustainable ecosystem and society. In his encyclical, entitled Praise be to you - On Care For Our Common Home, he called...
Sourcemap: doing well by doing good. Leonardo Bonanni’s company, Sourcemap, is doing well by doing good, and he’s helping companies to do the same. In working on his doctoral thesis at MIT, Leonardo Bonanni created a service that is good for the world on many levels –...
Remember the days when a rear-view mirror was all we needed to make business decisions? Now, predictive analytics appears poised to turn hindsight into a relic of the past. Two Gartner analysts echo that sentiment, stating, "Few technology areas will have greater...
The sharing of tangible and intangible assets will increasingly become a fundamental feature of successful businesses. Few developments of late are as intriguing as the rise and disruptive impact of the collaborative economy. In a very short time, services that we may...
To see lean perfected – study the NASCAR pit. In a matter of seconds, the pit crew has changed tires, wiped down the windshield, filled up fuel, and given the driver a drink of water. Everything is in the right place at the right time. If only every distribution...
Analytics is good for business -- as long as you can make sense of it. Does your business suffer from a case of data overload? Or do you steer clear of new investments in supply chain analytics because you are afraid they could yield more data than your business can...
In what seemed like a curious social experiment, KLM Royal Dutch Airline harnessed the popularity of social media and launched their “Meet and Seat” program in 2012. The service gives passengers the option to link their social media profiles to their boarding...
By creating and distributing valuable and relevant content in a strategic and consistent manner you create demand for your products and services and drive profitable customer action. That being said, while content is king, content doesn’t go far (actually it goes...
With LinkedIn claiming the top spot for social networking professionals, there’s a good chance you already access the social network regularly. But what you might be missing on LinkedIn could be the key to unlocking more business opportunities. Allow me to explain....
The battle for competitiveness in the cloud. In this age of radical transformation for supply chains, top companies are tying together prevailing concepts, like big data and the Internet of Things (IoT), with cloud-based computing. Supply chains are being reimagined...
In 1983, the year that Chevy Chase loaded his movie family into the Griswold’s station wagon in National Lampoon’s Vacation, Americans took an average of 20 vacation days. Now, the youngest member of the Griswold family is back on the big screen in 2015, this time...
"You're fired!" What you need to know about firing a client In the early stages most independent contractors and businesses encounter a learning curve when it comes to client procurement and business practices. They may need to find their footing in terms of...
How to increase prices and retain customers Companies raise prices all the time. There are various reasons, explanations, and results. Sometimes companies disclose the changes, but sometimes customers and clients never even catch wind of a change. Let’s have a look at...