If you were a bakery around the next corner, you would be selling your bread or sandwiches just over the counter. You will see and talk to the person just in front of you and you would immediately get the money for your product sold. You know the buyer, you trust him because you immediately get the money and there is not much risk involved. If you were an exporter/seller and your buyer is thousands of kilometers away, the situation may look different. Each party tries to reduce its risk. The buyer might tell you, that he will not pay any invoice before he has not received the product in good quality. And you might tell the buyer, that you will not ship anything, before you have not received the money. Banks address this dilemma with supply chain/trade-financing, a financial service that has been invented already several hundred years ago. You, as the seller, don’t want your foreign receivables sitting out there for months doing nothing. It is your working capital and therefo...
In a world faced with the prospect of tightening supplies, higher energy costs heightened geopolitical risk, and strained transportation networks, advanced supply chain technologies will become mission-critical for many more companies. The supply chain task is not an enterprise problem; it is an end-to-end network problem involving multiple enterprises. Therefore, the solution does not lie in fixing one link in the chain but in devising a community.