Erik Huddleston VP, Product Management - Strategic Applications latest blog erik.huddleston@inovis.com As Vice President of Products and Strategic Applications, Erik Huddleston drives the vision for the Inovis applications, including the Actionable Intelligence suite of products, community management offerings, collaboration, optimization offerings, and the Inovis Catalogue.

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Q. What improvements are businesses making for logistics?

A. Manufacturers and retailers alike today are myopically focused on the challenges they face on the elongation in their supply chains. With the sourcing in Asia and global distribution of products and markets, organizations today are having to make significant changes in process and technology to continue to improve the performance and speed of their supply chain.

Q. Has cross docking helped or hurt logistics in the supply chain?

A. Cross docking flow-through distribution and the increases in sophistication and complexity, mainly at the distribution centers, have been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, cross docking has dramatically improved inventory turns, reduced carrying costs and provided a myriad of other positive financial benefits to organizations. However, it has also increased the criticality of the information and performance of the business community.

Q. What would you recommend to optimize an organization's inventory?

A. Today, to improve inventory processes in almost any organization, the focus should be outside the four walls. Focus on in-transit logistics; focus on 3PL inventory locations; focus on even work-in-process at your manufacturing factories and the vendor-managed inventory that your partners are holding for you.

Q. What is Actionable Intelligence?

A. Actionable Intelligence was built to solve the problems associated with traditional approaches to business intelligence and reporting for outside-the-four-walls business processes. Not only does actionable intelligence provide you with the visibility into things that are going wrong in your supply chain in near real time, it provides you with a way to take action and solve those problems when they exist outside of the four walls and outside of your control.

Q. What improvements are businesses making around logistics?

A. Actionable Intelligence was built from the ground up to solve the complexities in the business processes outside the four walls. Since the majority of the challenges in inventory processes today exist with partners-both logistics providers as well as 3PLs-actionable intelligence is an excellent tool for solving those problems.