Over the last 5 years, Supply Chain Asia has been able to study and get involved in training the industry. Over time, it became obvious there was a lack of skills & experiential based training in our industry. In the upcoming months, we will be launching various programs under our Supply Chain Asia Academy structure. These include a 5-days residential Supply Chain Executive Development Program (International), 3-days Supply Chain Executive Development Program (In-country), Specialist Training in Supply Chain Management and some joint programs with institutions in various countries in Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, India and China. If you are keen to partner us, please email us at admin@supplychainasia.com. For about the Academy, click here. 
Britain’s largest retailer, Tesco, plans to open 23 new hypermarkets in China in this fiscal year, nine of which will be in new ‘lifespace’ malls.
“We will continue to expand in locations where we already have a presence and into other parts of the country. From Shanghai, we are pushing out west to Nanjing and managed to settle in Anhui last year,” a senior Tesco executive told Supply Chain Asia Magazine.
The retailer – which has a 30 percent share of the UK grocery market -- currently has 81 hypermarkets and three lifespace malls in China, as well as eight convenience stores in Shanghai. Lifespace malls are multi-storey outlets of Tesco stores and other stores and services.
Tesco has said it will spend US$3.9bn over the coming five years on its expansion in China.
Read more: Editor's Blogs - Tesco goes for centralised distribution to support China expansion
Several leading global brand owners have taken the downturn as an opportunity to get closer to customers and better understand demand. Dell, LG Electronics, Sony Corporation, P&G and Levis are among global brands putting more focus on mining point-of-sale data for better demand planning in their supply chains in the wake of the recession.
Read more: Editor's Blogs - Recession boosts point-of-sale data analytics among major global brands
It’s fair to say legal and regulatory risk associated with doing business in emerging markets is under more scrutiny these days. After a series of very large and globally-publicised supply chain failures, many of the organisations we are in regular contact with are being more proactive in assessing and limiting costs and potential costs from risks such as under-developed regulatory and policy environments, corruption, lack of respect for rule of law, supplier compliance problems, and labour violations along the supply chain.
Read more: Editor's Blogs - Coming to grips with the many uncertainties of risk
The role of technology in supply chain development and transformation is approaching a new dawn as new systems such as cloud computing are increasingly looked to by organisations to support their supply chain processes, according to the head of Accenture’s global supply chain practice.
“My feeling is that we’re going to see technology emerging again in a much more sustainable way than we have in the past and lead elements of supply chain development,” said Mark Pearson, Global Managing Director of Supply Chain Management with Accenture.
“We have been very quiet on the technology side in the past ten years. Now you have some very interesting developments emerging around SaaS and Cloud. We’re seeing companies – particularly in the transportation and warehousing space – increasingly looking to systems like Cloud to source processes.”
The need for more flexible and agile supply chains grounded in a better understanding of customer/human behaviour is a core takeaway lesson from the global recession, according to Simon Ratcliffe, Operations Director with the Just Group, a fashion retail business with 1,000 stores across Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
“The recession showed consumer behaviour in terms of what consumers were prepared to pay and when and where they were prepared to spend. We need to ask to what extent do our supply chains understand that behaviour,” said Ratcliffe, who was speaking at an invitation-only gathering of global supply chain leaders at Macquarie Graduate School of Management (MGSM) in Sydney.
Read more: Recession teaches a harsh lesson in human behaviour
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Supply Chain Asia Logistics Awards 2010 is now open for NOMINATIONS. Each email and voter will be allocated ONE VOTE and the TOP 5 NOMINATED COMPANIES & FINALISTS will be announced during Supply Chain Asia Forum 2010 to be held from 24-27 August 2010.
