How it Affects Small and Midsized Manufacturers

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. This has caused the recent trend toward offshore manufacturing operations and the procurement of materials from low cost country sources, which in turn introduces a higher level of complexity into the supply chain.

Watch the Webcast

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 management, legal and reporting requirements.

View this on-demand webcast to learn about 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?

Speakers

• Jill Jusko, Senior Editor, IndustryWeek
• Cindy Jutras, Vice President and Group Director, Manufacturing Research , Aberdeen Group