Tag Archives: inventory

BOSTON – Kraft Heinz is working with Spoiler Alert to step up food waste mitigation efforts.

Boston-based software company helps perishable CPG brands manage excess, slow-moving inventory. Working exclusively at the factory or distribution center level, it offers a B2B sales platform that allows food and beverage brands to manage their liquidation processes across private networks of discount retailers and non-profit channels. Companies including The Campbell Soup Co., Danone, KeHE, and HelloFresh use the platform to manage their B2B liquidation efforts.

“You can think of it as an operating system for sales and supply chain managers to manage their stressed sales efforts,” said Ricky Ashenfelter, co-founder and chief executive officer of Spoiler Alert. “Companies are absorbing distressed inventory data into our cloud-based platform and leveraging our workflows to communicate sales opportunities, collect offers from their unique buyer network, and allocate inventory – faster, with fewer errors and with longer shelf life. . “

Spoiler Alert provides data on what is being sold and not resold to the supply chain and sales leaders so they can develop a better understanding of how to best navigate future fluctuations, capture products with longer shelf life and more time to redistribute in the market.

“Demand planning remains an equal part of the arts and sciences,” said Ashenfelter. “Until producers can use forecast tools that can predict the weather perfectly, change consumer behavior or natural disasters, supply chain managers will always be faced with advantages and disadvantages.”

Shelf life is the most pervasive example of the stress that supply chain manufacturers face when dealing with excess or slow moving inventory. Manufacturers typically use sales in the secondary market when inventory is close to a fixed date coding guarantee with their primary retail customer.

“This is not an expiration date, and often products still have a shelf life of weeks or months to work with,” says Ashenfelter.

Other examples include seasonal items such as holiday-themed products or flavors, discontinued items and promotional items.

“As one example, a major producer shared with us stories about branding a number of their SKUs for a major film release scheduled for last summer,” said Ashenfelter. “As the pandemic hits and release dates are issued, retailers are backing away from bringing themed SKUs for films that consumers haven’t been excited about. Things like this happen all the time. “

Most companies rely on manual workflows for liquidation. The process is error-prone and time-consuming and may end up shaving off days or weeks of shelf life, resulting in food that is never sold or eaten. Companies can take advantage of the Spoiler Alert platform to maximize value recovery, strengthen relationships with discount retailers, and improve supply chain manager efficiency.

After the initial launch of the Spoiler Alert platform, Kraft Heinz increased the speed of offering inventory to customers by 75% and reduced overall inventory processing time by 50%.

“Given the diversity of products we sell across multiple channels with varying coded dates, our sales solutions team takes great care in handling excess and slow moving inventory by working with multiple partners to eliminate waste,” said Mike Ridenour, head of industry relations. and sales operations at Kraft Heinz. “We are driven by the functionality that the Spoiler Alert platform offers us from an automation, intelligence and analytics perspective.”

Mitigating food waste is a top priority for the company, added Jacob Saxon, head of US sales solutions.

“Our goal is to get more products into the hands of consumers through our value channel retailers who specialize in opportunistic buying,” says Saxon. “Spoiler Alert has allowed us to take this effort to another level, enabling our team to better partner with our key retail customers and respond more quickly to supply fluctuations.”

Along with supporting food waste mitigation, the Spoiler Alert platform can help companies address issues around food insecurity.

“There has been a significant increase in discount retail over the past 12 months,” said Ashenfelter. “This increase in demand comes from two things. One has to do with the impact of a pandemic on public health, the other has to do with the financial impact of the pandemic. “

Both traditional and discount traders are seeing increased demand as consumers shift spending from the food service channel to home meal prep, he said. What matters more is an increase in unemployment and food insecurity. More than 10 million Americans are currently unemployed, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Millions of others are unemployed. Feeding America estimates more than 50 million Americans are food insecure, up from 35 million before COVID.

“As the unemployment rate and food insecurity increase, not surprisingly, so does the demand for more affordable food options,” said Ashenfelter. “Value channel retail and nonprofits provide an important source of nourishment for millions of Americans in difficult times as well as good times.”

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Games

Scary enemies in innocent games in Mario, Zelda and others | Instant News

October 29, 2020 NewsDesk

Illustration of article entitled Unexpected nightmare: The scariest enemy in a non-creepy game — Illustration: Allison Corr

Horror – at least intentional horror – is a late arrival into the world of video games. Of course, there are salvos opening (Infocom’s Horror Lurking in 1987, House at the Famicom in ’89, the first Clock Tower games on the Super Famicom a few years later). But devoting an entire video game to scaring the gamers didn’t really become a viable marketing strategy until 1996, when Capcom’s Waiting demon was such a huge hit that the industry had to come up with an entirely new name – survival horror, a mix of combat and deliberate escape – to describe what it saw.

Which is not to say, for all of the horror game’s early absence, video games aren’t horror yetfying. Any media that spends this much time trying to kill its consumers will have several nightmares over the years – deepening because it happens to “you”, not just some random character on the screen. And just like TV and movies, many of the scariest creatures in the horror video game frightened range especially because they appear in games where you can hope to be safe from the abominations of the older or the restless dead. You can rely on zombies to try to bite Jill Valentine or Frank West. But who would have thought Ecco The Dolphin had to deal with space demons, or ZeldaThe link to fend off the screaming, dead-eyed undead with no sense of personal space? Nothing is scarier than a dirty safe haven, the sudden change from sunlit meadows to instant nightmares.

So we celebrate these, the scariest video game monsters born out of games that aren’t really scary this a lot of crap this many players. The giant eel, the evil celestial body, the tormented ghost of the mind, all hid only inches from the sun. It’s never what you might expect.

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pakistan

The bonded warehouse sees a surge in inventory in the middle of the lock | Instant News

April 19, 2020 NewsDesk

The bonded warehouse sees a surge in inventory in the middle of the lock

KARACHI: Because terminal operators and shipping companies refused to set aside demurrage and detention costs for shipments that were stranded at the port in the middle of the locking, traders began moving imported goods to bonded warehouses, this was studied on Saturday.

An official said there had been a sudden surge in bonded warehouses because the port refused to release penalties, while expectations of a further increase in rupee value to the greenback forced importers to bind the goods.

“Duties and taxes are imposed on the value of imported goods in dollars, and a strong rupee will save the additional amount that importers will pay on the dollar at a higher rate,” the official said.

Taxable goods can be stored in bonded warehouses without payment of import taxes for a period of six months. The importer only pays taxes on the amount of goods released from the warehouse. Thus, traders pay taxes in some parts avoiding the tax burden immediately.

The port witnessed severe congestion because importers could not accept shipments due to supply line disruptions because the Sindh government could not reduce locking without the presence of an efficient mechanism for examining health hazards posed by novel coronaviruses. Containers piled up at the port.

Sea trade is very important for Pakistan’s economy which is dependent on imports. Exports and imports contribute 10 to 20 percent of GDP, but it is important to keep the economy going. Economic growth has slowed to 3.3 percent last year from 5.5 percent and is expected to fall further to negative 1.5 percent this fiscal year – the first time since the country’s partition of India. Traders complain that they face problems in movement on the road.

Khurram Aijaz of the Karachi Customs Agency Association said terminal operators and shipping lines do not waive demurrage and detention fees, which is one reason why shipments are not removed from ports by importers.

“Traders’ money lines have dried up because the market is closed,” Aijaz said. “Most of them can’t even pay banks to get their documents released, let alone demurrage and detention fees of up to millions of dollars.”

Aijaz said terminal operators must provide assistance to traders, so cargo is removed so as to provide space for new shipments. “Importers will get their shipments transferred to bonded warehouses, where space is still available along with the option to pay taxes during the course of time.”

Traders say they have no money and cannot pay demurrage and detention. “They are better off leaving goods that have perished at the port,” Aijaz said. He complained that there were no steps at the office of the terminal operator and shipping company to protect against COVID-19.

Importers called on authorities to set aside one percent of customs duty imposed on moving cargo to bonded warehouses from the port until the end of June.

Chairman of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry, which stands on the customs committee Shabbir Churra, said importers must pay an additional one percent duty when goods are moved to bonded warehouses from the port, while goods in bonded warehouses must be released within six months.

“After six months, importers must pay additional fees, which at that time exceed the value of the goods,” Churra said. “Now that markets and businesses have been closed because they are locked, merchants cannot accept delivery of their shipments.”

Chuhra demanded the government to abolish one percent additional customs along with additional costs to stay in excess of goods until 30 June and additional fees have been imposed on importers.

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