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When you produce basically anything, strong supply chain management is imperative. When a supply chain works well, the customer experiences better product quality and distribution

Werk aims to make flexibility access equitable across gender lines and invests in individual employee success by offering personalized flex reports with the exact information working women need to perform their best at work and at home. It's a community of recruitment and career firms that partner with progressive employers to offer U. S. women better work/life integration opportunities ranging from job sharing and flexjob creation to returning to the workforce after a long absence and changing your career. The Alliance aims to help greater numbers of women stay in the workforce in a less life-consuming way as they care for both children and aging parents—and achieve professional fulfillment and long-term financial security in the process. Just like the original Bumble sought to make dating less uncomfortable for women, its younger sibling Bumble Bizz wants to provide a safe forum for working women to collaborate, share and learn alongside one another.

Helped by Gabriele Rizzo, futurist adviser for private and public international defense organizations, and Alexander Bird, CEO of micronutrient food manufacturer Kiss My Keto, let's look at the pros and cons of local versus global supply chains. These factors led global management consulting firm AlixPartners to report that 69 percent of the 106 U. S. and western European manufacturing firms that responded to their 2016 annual survey were considering moving production closer to their home bases. Also, depending on your industry—and especially if you are in manufacturing—you may face significant skills shortages in certain U. S. regions, but can readily find available labor in countries such as China and Mexico. That said, time lags, shipping delays and language and communication barriers associated with global supply chains may negatively impact a business's speed, agility and on-time delivery record.

"Teaming together human creativity, abstract thinking and adaptive response together with machine precision gets you the best of both worlds, leaving machines in charge of what they do best—easy, repeatable tasks—and freeing humans to be the best they can be," says Dr. Gabriele Rizzo, a futurist adviser for private and public international defense organizations. But businesses will need to work with labor unions and governments to transition workers into new roles and help them to re- and upskill, and to enforce the appropriate labor laws involving safety, wages and hours. Although technology innovations such as VCAs and autonomous mobile robots are getting smarter, human workers are still needed to integrate and oversee their participation—and this often requires a highly specialized, but not always readily available, skillset. To fully leverage Big Data's potential, owners must determine the data science skills required for their operations, and work to source these either internally or externally.