CFO Magazine: Labor Shortage and Supply Disruptions Weighed on CFOs in Q3

“Most chief financial officers also reported that their firms were experiencing supply chain disruptions that they expect to last into 2022 or later. Fewer than 10% of those surveyed said they anticipated the troubles to be resolved by the end of the year.”

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Industry Week: ISM: Continued Growth, but No End in Sight for Labor, Commodity Shortages

“The price of aluminum has increased now for 16 months in a row alongside the trend in manufacturing growth. Other commodities up in price for longer than a year include polypropylene (15 months up in price), steel (14 months), and plastic resins (13). Electrical and electronic components were listed as up in price for a tenth month each, and semiconductors marked an eighth more-expensive month.”

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Industry Week: Metalformers Face Raw Material Price Hikes and Labor Shortages

“Average lead times at metalforming companies are increasing with barely any sign of slowing down. Just over six in ten survey respondents said average lead times are longer than they were three months ago. That number fell three percentage points from August, when it read 64%. More than half of PMA members have reported increased average lead times for every month since February 2021 now.”

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CFO Magazine: The Great Logistics Crunch

“Many of these practices fly in the face of the traditional philosophy of just-in-time inventory management focused on cutting supply chain costs to the bone. The future calls for investment in supply chain professionals who can manage relationships and implement systems to integrate with and monitor suppliers. Continuing to run a supply chain that’s hostage to logistics bottlenecks, price instability, and poor visibility will ultimately result in increased business risk and disappointed customers.”

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Industry Week: Visibility Is Everything in the New Automotive Supply Chain

“Traditionally, it has been very difficult to create a line of sight through an entire automotive supply chain for a variety of reasons, including a lack of trust and communication between stakeholders, reliance on poor volume forecasts and outmoded data management systems. The result is an unknown number of potentially disastrous threat vectors that remain buried until it’s too late to avoid them.”

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Industry Week: Evolve Your Supply Chain Management to Be More Strategic

“Accuracy in forecasting can be as much of an art as a science in many industries. But it is hard to make strategic decisions if your forecasting is at 50 percent accuracy.”

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CFO Journal: Technology Budgets Shift to Reflect Pandemic-Era Priorities

“By exposing major supply chain weaknesses, including demand surges and drops, reduced productivity, raw material shortages, and storage and product handling issues, COVID-19 became a surprise catalyst for the adoption of resilient supply chain analysis and management solutions.”

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Global Finance Magazine: Supply Chain Management Under Disruption

“Digital technologies will be a critical component of every company’s supply chain moving forward. They help optimize operations and achieve cost-saving goals, while enabling better customer-responsiveness from suppliers all along the chain.

Executives in this space talk a lot about the “supply chain control tower”—a dashboard of data, key performance indicators and other metrics that help managers achieve real-time, end-to-end visibility of their supply chains.”

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CFO Magazine: Four Questions CFOs Should Ask Their Supply Chain Leaders

“For CFOs, it is critical to remain engaged in these conversations with their CSCOs and broader supply chain and transportation leadership. This includes making transportation volatility a C-suite-level conversation, capturing growth while controlling costs, ensuring that upstream and downstream collaboration is part of the ongoing strategy to strengthen the value chain, and adapting to a fast-changing environment.”

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