Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Biz Innovations Changing Female Lives

In the business world, women haven't always had it easy. Until the end of the 20^th century, it was uncommon for women to work at all. And even once we entered the hallowed halls of American companies, we struggled with unconscious bias and pay disparities. Fortunately, though, 21^st-century business innovation is benefiting women in an unprecedented fashion. Let's explore a few recent innovations that have changed working women's lives for the better.

Business Innovation #1: Flexibility Drivers

Werk is an analytics dashboard that helps organizations offer targeted flexibility options to their workforces. The company's proprietary assessment methodology uncovers how well an organization is meeting its employees' needs and the flexibility programs that will drive the greatest impact and return on investment. Werk aims to make flexibility access equitable across gender lines and invests in individual employee success by offering personalized flex reports with the exact information working women need to perform their best at work and at home.

Also, women's flexwork thought leader Kathryn Sollmann recently launched The Flexwork for Women Alliance. It's a community of recruitment and career firms that partner with progressive employers to offer U.S. women better work/life integration opportunities ranging from job sharing and flexjob creation to returning to the workforce after a long absence and changing your career. The Alliance aims to help greater numbers of women stay in the workforce in a less life-consuming way as they care for both children and aging parents—and achieve professional fulfillment and long-term financial security in the process.

Business Innovation #2: Women-First Networks

Bumble made headlines a few years ago when it became the first dating app to mandate that women had to make the first move. Now, the company behind Bumble is spreading its wings to offer Bumble Bizz, an online network in which women can take the initiative to make professional connections on their own terms. Just like the original Bumble sought to make dating less uncomfortable for women, its younger sibling Bumble Bizz wants to provide a safe forum for working women to collaborate, share and learn alongside one another.

For the rest of the innovations, check out the full article on the AMEX Business site. 

 

Modern Businesses: Local Versus Global

Not long ago, offshoring of goods and services was a foolproof way to keep costs down—if you could manage it. Now, however, due to changing markets, local sourcing is experiencing an upswing. Helped by Gabriele Rizzo, futurist adviser for private and public international defense organizations, and Alexander Bird, CEO of micronutrient food manufacturer Kiss My Keto, let's look at the pros and cons of local versus global supply chains.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Local and Global Supply Chains

Since local supply chains are often smaller, local suppliers may require less of an initial investment and allow smaller orders, which results in lower stored inventory costs.

In some foreign countries, worker wages are increasing, so the gap in labor costs between local and global supply chain strategies is diminishing. For instance, according to Eurostat data released in the fall of 2018, wage growth in the eurozone reached its fastest rate for two years, accelerating in the second quarter of 2017.

Also, goods and services production is becoming more specialized and geared to local customers, and in such cases, there is often an advantage of being physically close to the buyer. These factors led global management consulting firm AlixPartners to report that 69 percent of the 106 U.S. and western European manufacturing firms that responded to their 2016 annual survey were considering moving production closer to their home bases.

But global supply chains have substantial benefits as well. Today's economy is unquestionably global and having only local operations may result in lost opportunities and stalled growth.

Also, depending on your industry—and especially if you are in manufacturing—you may face significant skills shortages in certain U.S. regions, but can readily find available labor in countries such as China and Mexico. Raw materials may also be less expensive in a foreign market, and global supply chains also allow businesses to take advantage of the innovation afforded by emerging markets.

That said, time lags, shipping delays and language and communication barriers associated with global supply chains may negatively impact a business's speed, agility and on-time delivery record.

Finally, political situations can sour quickly, so global supply chains in certain regions of the world may carry a higher risk of business disruption overall.

For more where this came from, check out the American Express Business site.

Supply Chains of the Future: What You Need to Know

There's a significant amount of change taking place in business today, and it requires owners to avoid disruption to their supply chain strategy.

Supply chain management plans will need to take into account automation and tech innovation, new geographies and regional sourcing, increased regulation and climate change.

Automation and Tech Innovation

Extensive job automation can affect your supply chain strategy for the better because it allows organizations to reap the unique strengths of both humans and machines.

"Teaming together human creativity, abstract thinking and adaptive response together with machine precision gets you the best of both worlds, leaving machines in charge of what they do best—easy, repeatable tasks—and freeing humans to be the best they can be," says Dr. Gabriele Rizzo, a futurist adviser for private and public international defense organizations.

But businesses will need to work with labor unions and governments to transition workers into new roles and help them to re- and upskill, and to enforce the appropriate labor laws involving safety, wages and hours. They may also want to consider developing a means to collect worker feedback and adjust operations, so they meet employee needs throughout the march toward automation.

According to Rizzo, implementing automation and other emerging technologies are of utmost importance in building and maintaining an edge in supply chain operations.

"These technologies enable fine-grained gathering of operational data, advanced analysis of processes and impacts and faster decision making," she says.

A 2017 Gartner report predicted that by 2021, virtual customer assistants (VCAs) and chatbots will handle 20 percent of all customer service interactions. Although technology innovations such as VCAs and autonomous mobile robots are getting smarter, human workers are still needed to integrate and oversee their participation—and this often requires a highly specialized, but not always readily available, skillset.

If your supply chain strategy already incorporates data analytics, you're off to a great start. But even so, it's becoming even more important for owners to zero in on the information that's most useful and relevant to them.

Technology-based supplier audits are valuable, as are digital platforms and dashboards that assess the effectiveness of operations and worker sentiment in real time.

To fully leverage Big Data's potential, owners must determine the data science skills required for their operations, and work to source these either internally or externally.

For more where this came from, head over to the American Express Business site.