position best-in-class information technology innovators is American President Lines and APL Logistics, subsidiaries of NOL Group. InformationWeek ranking of the 500 largest and most innovative users of IT across all industries shows that the company has advanced to 72nd place from 456th place last year and is the only global container transportation and logistics entity ranked. The company has also singled out for IT and service excellence by customers and industry organizations including Philips Electronics, Sears Roebuck, Kellogg, Colgate-Palmolive, and through Inbound Logistics, Journal of Commerce, Lloyd’s Loading List, Cargo News Asia and others, solving complex distribution problems for customers. Statistics shows that about 30% of APL’s customers around the world are now using the company’s e-commerce capabilities to conduct their businesses with the company. According to Don Liedtke, NOL’s chief information officer based in Oakland, CA, collaboration is the key. He described that to meet customer demand for seamless, comprehensive and reliable information on which to base business decisions today, company must integrate data from the many sources involved in a customer’s supply chain. It means that collaborating with the customers and own business partners and vendors, and also with the customers other vendors and even with own competitors is the key to help smooth workflow. For the businesses and organizations today IT is the main business process re-engineering movement that brings the innovation. At this time supply chain management has moved from low level and highly fragmented set of administrative and overhead operations—to a strategic enterprise initiative. The evidence for it is the business-to-business e-commerce explosion and announcements by different industry representatives that they are launching cooperative logistics hubs. An original solution for Supply Chain Execution is pro...
