166 | Business World Magazine |
November 2013
supply chain solutions have become in-
creasingly important to industry. Our ob-
jective is to not only save clients money,
but to help them keep their finger on the
pulse of their supply chain and make sure
it’s operating as they designed.”
A decade ago, Read says, companies
were far more reticent to rely on solutions
housed outside their own four-walled in-
frastructure. But with the dawn of the in-
ternet and evolving awareness of capabil-
ities the technology empowers, Fortune
1000 companies have been more open
to embrace the potential from varying
technical platforms, which include cloud-
based solutions. As a case study, Read
points out the possibilities Agistix has
provided to an Indiana-based enterprise
that employs more than 46,000 employ-
ees and serve customers in 190 countries
through a complex network of compa-
ny-owned and independent distributors
among 6,500 dealer locations. Read says
the company had 1,500 FedEx account
numbers and another 1,000 UPS account
numbers being used by 3,000-plus ship-
pers around the world. Because of the
far-flung nature of the distribution and
the vast array of directions in which the
myriad vendors were pulling, the compa-
