While globalization was once the exclusive domain of large multi-billion dollar companies, today even small to medium size enterprises cannot escape the issues associated with global trade and offshore manufacturing. Whether you view the world as flat or round, it is definitely shrinking. North American and European companies have been challenged by the introduction of lower priced products coming into their markets from countries with inexpensive labor, causing the trend in recent years toward offshore manufacturing operations and the procurement of materials from low cost country sources (LCCS), which in turn introduces a higher level of complexity into the supply chain.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a mission critical component of any globalization strategy. Yet this is often overlooked while focus is concentrated on supply chain issues. As a result, the majority of companies today still rely on some element of manual effort and/or spreadsheets in order to consolidate financial reporting and fulfill global trade, legal, and reporting requirements.
Join us as we explore the extent to which companies have global operations and engage in global trade and whether these global operations are expanding or shrinking. Are companies re-thinking low cost country sourcing strategies? Does off-shore production involve opening up new production facilities or outsourcing? And what implications do these decisions have on ERP?
