What motivates business owners toward their biggest buying decisions, and how can vendors align their sales tactics to buyer needs? Global peer advisory and coaching network The Alternative Board surveyed business owners in all major industries on the factors influencing their largest purchases, and the results might surprise you. Below find five factors every vendor should keep in mind when guiding customers through their sales funnel. READ MORE

Have you assessed your procurement needs and decided it’s time to search for a new domestic supplier? We’ve put together the following presentation to guide you through the processing of selecting procurement tools, making your short-list and more. READ MORE

Textile manufacturers in the USA have been making dramatic progress over the past few decades, erasing the stereotypes of labor-intensive, low-wage and slow going production. This progress is not only limited to the production process; the entire industry landscape has seen dramatic change. READ MORE

When it comes to creating a commercially viable product, great ideas can only go so far. For any chance at success in the marketplace, businesses need to invest in both a sound product and an optimized production process. Contract manufacturers can help with the latter. READ MORE

With increasing access to, and demand from, overseas markets, today’s SME’s are ideally poised to realize the immense opportunity and lucrative potential that lies in exporting their products. Typically, though, small and medium-size businesses don’t have the resources – financial, operational or otherwise – to move beyond their own locally established domestic markets and meet with compliance needs, no matter how great the prospect of new international market expansion. READ MORE

The rising dollar, caused in large part by the termination of the Fed’s long-running bond-buying program, has become a key theme among economists, financiers, entrepreneurs and politicians. While the rising dollar is good news for those planning to travel to countries with currencies depreciating against the U.S. dollar and for U.S. workers sending remittances to family abroad, this might not be good news for the U.S. economy – mainly U.S. exporters and multinationals. READ MORE

According to a recent study commissioned by Blur Group, 87 percent of U.S. decision makers in procurement and vendor management agreed that they would like to partner with new service providers, though 71 percent felt they had little freedom to develop new partnerships. READ MORE

Today’s modern supply chains are not linear, but dynamic and multi-directional – and the digital solutions currently available to supply chain professionals only enhance that fact. READ MORE

Knowing that price reduction and razor thin margins are top of mind for executives, an important question has emerged for today’s supply chains: at what point does a race for competitive prices become a race to the bottom? READ MORE

Welcome to Partnerships Matter, our column on businesses changing lives and growing their operations through strategic partnerships and collaboration. In this edition, we highlight the advances being made in big data analytics through the collaboration of leading Hadoop advocates Cloudera and Cask. READ MORE