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White Papers

Consumer Packaged Goods
Building and Leveraging Metrics Framework to Drive Supply Chain Performance
Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies can maximize the effectiveness of Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM) by adopting a metrics framework-based approach to monetize investments in business intelligence and analytics.
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Business Intelligence (BI) Governance
Given the limitations of people, infrastructure and budget, companies must classify and prioritize their business requests to implement a formal IT governance process. However, to prioritize BI requests along specific criteria, they need a BI governance process. How is a BI governance process defined? Why should it go beyond the basics of approving and prioritizing initiatives?
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Establishing Business Intelligence (BI) Self Service Platform
Implementation of a self-service BI platform is a daunting task. Its benefits are substantial and influence performance of the company. Find out how a self-service BI platform can be enabled effectively.
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Performance Management (PM), the Key for a Successful C-Commerce Relationship
Providing BI capabilities to suppliers is imperative to enable C-Commerce across a value chain. Access to information is not sufficient; the key to a successful c-Commerce relationship lies in strong performance management.
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Effective Visualization Techniques for Business Intelligence (BI)
Companies use BI applications or technologies to analyze information from external and internal sources. Such information helps understand changing trends, customer behavior and spending patterns, empowering managers to take informed business decisions. Effective BI helps companies gain a comprehensive understanding of factors affecting their business. Our expert examines and deliberates visual representations of requirements with clickable mock-ups to provide an effective way to overcome problems.
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Demand Management
Order Management
The manufacturing industry lacks visibility into customer and supplier fronts of supply chain, the key to strategic planning and execution. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) investments contribute to enhanced productivity and profitability through efficient order management processes. Companies must integrate an enterprise view of CRM and SRM systems to capitalize on opportunities from demand and supply perspectives thereby growing profits and Return on Investment (ROI).
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Performance Management (PM), the Key for a Successful C-Commerce Relationship
Providing BI capabilities to suppliers is imperative to enable C-Commerce across a value chain. Access to information is not sufficient; the key to a successful c-Commerce relationship lies in strong performance management.
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Energy & Utilities
Performance Monitoring in a Refinery using Linear Programming Tools
The use of Linear Programming (LP) tools for both long-term planning and day-to-day scheduling is fairly common in refineries. LP tools identify and quantify variations between the LP run plan output and actual operations effectively. Depending on the level of business and IT tools adoption in a company, the challenge can be a 'retro' LP model or defining the framework for performance evaluation or data consolidation and validation for the LP run. Apart from the obvious benefits of performance monitoring, using the same LP model fine-tunes the model itself and identifies further areas of GRM boosting.
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Finance
Financial Supply Chains: Applying Classical SCM Techniques for Savings
Financial supply chains are packed with untapped savings opportunities. Infosys believes that in an increasingly networked environment, systematic and proven techniques can help realize such opportunities.
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Hi-Tech
Inventory Optimization: A Necessity Turning to Urgency
Greater variability and uncertainty across global supply chains have increased the complexity of manufacturing and distribution. Infosys' experts believe that inventory optimization, backed by advanced technology, is the only way out.
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Global Trends in Supply Chain Planning in the Semiconductor Industry
Our expert tracks the supply chain ecosystem in the semiconductor industry and evaluates supply chain planning scenarios in both collaborative and non-collaborative systems.
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Management of Supplier Risks in Global Supply Chains
Supplier Risk Management (SRM) has become a focus area in the wake of low-cost country outsourcing, geo-political instability and recurrent natural disasters. Our experts propose a new SRM framework to mitigate risks.
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Financial Supply Chains: Applying Classical SCM Techniques for Savings
Financial supply chains are packed with untapped savings opportunities. Infosys believes that in an increasingly networked environment, systematic and proven techniques can help realize such opportunities.
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Managing Costs by Leveraging Procurement Information Intelligently
Our expert maintains that a 360° approach to locating where enterprise spends are made can help procurement departments manage costs better.
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Knowledge Applications Enabling Competitiveness for Consumer Electronics Manufacturers through Supply Chain Information Management
Transforming supply chain data to information and synthesizing such information into knowledge for decision-making is imperative for competitiveness and profitability.
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Business Intelligence: Delivering Business Value through Supply Chain Analytics
A supply chain analytics solution can help managers across the enterprise analyze barriers to market entry, respond to competition within well-defined supply tier structures, deal with the threat of product substitutes, continually drive product innovation, and manage product lifecycles to maximize returns
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Inventory Management
A Relook at Inventory Classification for Superior e-Shopping Experience
E-commerce traffic continues to rise exponentially in the retail industry. Growth, however, is hindered by slow e-commerce websites. Retailers need to rethink their inventory availability strategies to achieve faster browsing without compromising on-time deliveries. Our white paper addresses the challenge of scalability by using a differentiated inventory visibility strategy. It avoids maintaining inventory positions for sold items leading to an improved website shopping experience.
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Inventory Optimization: A Necessity Turning to Urgency
Greater variability and uncertainty across global supply chains have increased the complexity of manufacturing and distribution. Infosys’ experts believe that inventory optimization, backed by advanced technology, is the only way out.
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Shrink Management
Better use of technology can tackle shrink, from mitigating theft to Point-Of-Sale error reduction. The reasons behind shrink are varied, depending on the type of products and clientele. Our white paper provides an approach that ensures diligence in identifying the primary causes of shrink before proceeding to mitigate them, thus ensuring maximum return on investment.
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Logistics & Transportation
Driving Costs out of the Supply Chain: Inbound Logistics
Our white paper discusses best practices from the most successful inbound logistics programs of manufacturing companies in the automotive industry and Consumer Packaged Goods manufacturers. It also discusses the role of a 3PL services provider (focusing on transportation and warehousing services) in this equation.
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Logistics Optimization (LogO): Leveraging Internal Visibility to Reduce Item Landed Cost
Traditional approaches that help companies reduce landed costs focus on the symptoms and not the causes of the problem. If a company views transportation as a problem area, it may implement a Transportation Management System (TMS), expecting it to curtail creeping landed costs. While any TMS streamlines transportation procurement and generates optimal loads and routes, it is constrained by inputs. Our white paper goes beyond the symptoms contributing to landed cost and, instead, examines underlying factors to provide a solution. While the reasons for a rise in transportation spend such as rising fuel costs and external supply chain visibility, are well known, the overlooked causes mostly pertain to organizational behavior. Infosys' Logistics Optimization (LogO) solution, which ensures internal visibility coupled with collaboration, can go a long way in addressing the problem.
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Manufacturing
Service Performance Workbench - A Strategic Differentiator
Customer retention, the lack of seamless collaboration, unreliable performance and service measurement, and inaccurate forecasting are some of the challenges that plague service practitioners in the manufacturing industry. In the face of increasing business complexities, service functions need to be transformed to improve customer satisfaction, enhance profitability, create a responsive service supply chain and optimize field service operations. Infosys' experts examine how the Service Performance Workbench (SPW) helps address these challenges by providing visibility and offering performance metrics for the after-sales service supply chain.
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Integrating MES and Enterprise Systems: Creating the Agile and Responsive High-Tech Manufacturer
For any MES/ enterprise integration effort to be manageable and effective, it must adopt a top-down perspective and use processes as the organizational foundation for a staged implementation of integration.
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AMR Research Study in Collaboration with Infosys Reveals Success Factors for Supply Chain Visibility
Process manufacturers must sense and respond accurately to customer demand to improve operational performance and reduce their operating costs. Accurate forecasts increase agility and enable manufacturers to transcend risk mitigation and focus on innovation and continuous improvement. A market study by AMR Research in collaboration with Infosys across the United States and Europe outlines the goals of process manufacturers to enhance visibility across the supply chain and reduce risks due to complexity: Align strategy with the manufacturing network: Drive business strategies with standardized business processes, design-for-manufacturing improvements and asset optimization, Measure performance accurately: Leverage metrics for real-time insight into quality, safety, efficiency, and costs to identify gaps in supply chain performance, Apply manufacturing metrics: Use metrics to improve responsiveness and flexibility of product supply. A demand-driven value network ensures customer-focused, just-in-time manufacturing and Gain an integrated view of performance.
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Services
Return-Refurbish-Resell: Maximizing Value from the Reverse Logistics Chain
In a majority of industries, the key to cutting costs lies in successfully managing returns. Cutting reverse logistics costs by refurbishing and reselling returned goods can positively impact a company's profitability. Reverse logistics can, in fact; be transformed into a strategic differentiator for companies in the high technology industry. Infosys' experts discuss this challenge and how an integrated solution approach promises high optimization, track and trace reconciliation and decision support to reverse logistics processes.
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Warranty: From Liability to Competitive Advantage
Warranty management is an enterprise-wide challenge that impacts departments of quality, customer service, product development, finance and procurement. Infosys' approach to warranty management encompasses strategy, warranty operations and processes. We focus on Bridging gaps between customer service, quality and engineering departments, Ensuring OEM collaboration between upstream and downstream partners, Leveraging technology to gain insights into quality, engineering and manufacturing processes.
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Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Reverse Logistics
The retail industry seeks to meet consumer demand with a range of products and variants. Ironically, the wide choice elevates consumer expectations to such high levels that the slightest variation in product attributes causes dissatisfaction and returns. In their quest to compete with traditional retailers, online retailers have adopted extremely liberal, high-cost return policies. A focused approach to reverse logistics management can improve back-office operations, efficiency, customer experience and brand loyalty.
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Service Performance Workbench - A Strategic Differentiator
Customer retention, the lack of seamless collaboration, unreliable performance and service measurement, and inaccurate forecasting are some of the challenges that plague service practitioners in the manufacturing industry. In the face of increasing business complexities, service functions need to be transformed to improve customer satisfaction, enhance profitability, create a responsive service supply chain and optimize field service operations. Infosys' experts examine how the Service Performance Workbench (SPW) helps address these challenges by providing visibility and offering performance metrics for the after-sales service supply chain.
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Sourcing & Procurement
Actionable Insights On Contract Performance Improvement
Contract compliance is a critical area for all Chief Procurement Officers. They constantly monitor dashboards to curb savings leakage owing to contract non-compliance. This view point proposes Contract Performance Management Maturity Assessment Framework to identify shortfalls in contract management processes and technology capabilities. Further, our expert recommends investments in effective spend analysis capabilities and metrics to identify opportunities for shoring up bottom-line margins.
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Contract Lifecycle Management: The DNA of Procurement
Companies face challenges in contract management, resulting in lost savings. Contract management, an integral part of spend management, links strategy with execution. Infosys' experts share their perspectives on the benefits and implementation of the 'right' strategy to help you address issues while leveraging contracts across the enterprise
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Order Management
A typical IT environment in the manufacturing industry lacks visibility into the customer and supplier fronts of the supply chain, which holds the key to strategic planning and execution. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) investments contribute to increased productivity and improved profitability only through efficient order management processes. Taking an enterprise view of CRM and SRM systems, companies must integrate them to capitalize on opportunities from demand and supply perspectives to increase profits and return on investment.
Download »  (Registration Required)

Management of Supplier Risks in Global Supply Chains
Supplier Risk Management (SRM) has become a focus area in the wake of low-cost country outsourcing, geo-political instability and recurrent natural disasters. Infosys proposes a new SRM framework to mitigate risks.
Download »

Financial Supply Chains: Applying Classical SCM Techniques for Savings
Financial supply chains are full of untapped savings opportunities. Infosys believes that in an increasingly networked environment, systematic and proven techniques can help realize such opportunities.
Download »

Managing Costs by Leveraging Procurement Information Intelligently
Our expert maintains that a 360° approach to looking at where enterprise spends are being made can help procurement departments manage costs better.
Download »

Supply Chain Performance Management
Using Metrics to Improve Product Supply Capabilities - An Infosys Perspective
Today's supply chains are so interwoven that even a minor problem can trigger crippling reactions across organizations and geographies. On the other side are the demanding and discerning customers. Agility is essential for manufacturing organizations to walk the tightrope of a fragile supply chain driven by customers. A study by AMR Research in collaboration with Infosys reveals that manufacturing companies have started investing in data visibility solutions. Increased usage of metrics will impact immediate performance gaps in yields (59%), quality (48%) and schedule adherence (49%). Infosys believes that a manufacturing intelligence system that links manufacturing metrics to the supply chain and customers to provide a foundation of visibility into operations is the need of the day.
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Enabling Collaboration in Automotive Retailing
Our white paper provides a contextual layout of the auto-retailing segment in North America and Europe. It outlines the challenges and business impact posed by the current Information Technology (IT) landscape. Infosys suggests an approach to improve efficiency and effectiveness in automotive retailing and offers recommendations to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Dealer Service Providers (DSPs).
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Real-time Information for the Pervasive Enterprise
Enterprises need real-time visibility into operations in order to be responsive to market dynamics and competition. Pervasive technologies provide real-time visibility, transforming the way companies make decisions. Our white paper outlines the architecture that helps leverage these technologies to transform an organization into a pervasive enterprise.
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Building and Leveraging Metrics Framework to Drive Supply Chain Performance
Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies can maximize the effectiveness of Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM) by adopting a metrics framework-based approach to monetize investments in business intelligence and analytics.
Download »

Knowledge Applications Enabling Competitiveness for Consumer Electronics Manufacturers through Supply Chain Information Management
Transforming supply chain data to information and further synthesizing information to knowledge for decision-making is imperative for competitiveness and profitability.
Download »

Business Intelligence: Delivering Business Value through Supply Chain Analytics
A supply chain analytics solution can help managers across the enterprise analyze barriers to market entry, respond to competition within well-defined supply tier structures, deal with the threat of product substitutes, continually drive product innovation, and manage product lifecycles to maximize returns.
Download »

Adopting collaboration strategies in Supply Chain Planning for the Semiconductor industry
Adopting collaboration strategies in supply chain planning can help reduce the bull-whip effect on back-end fabs and reduce risks associated with fluctuating demands on the OEM, CM and consumer side of semiconductor supply chains.
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