Supply chains keep profits from sliding: North Carolina's roads, ports and airports give it a competitive advantage over other states, logistics experts say.

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How is technology changing supply-chain management--the process of getting raw goods to factories and finished products to distributors? Experts assembled by Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice PLLC, a Winston-Salem-based law firm, recently discussed that and other topics. Panelists were Paul Clayton, vice president of global logistics for GlaxoSmithKline in Research Triangle Park; Thomas Eagar, CEO of the North Carolina State Ports Authority in Wilmington; Timothy Martin, senior vice president of supply-chain management for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, a subsidiary of Winston-Salem-based Reynolds American; Greg Plemmons, vice president of Old Dominion Global, part of Old Dominion Freight Line in Thomasville; and Gregory Chabon, the law firm's supply-chain team leader. The discussion, moderated by Arthur O. Murray, BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA'S managing editor for special projects, was held at Womble Carlyle's Greensboro office.

When Dell came to the Triad, many suppliers came with it. Will that become the norm for manufacturers?

Clayton: Dell is different. We're in the pharmaceutical business, and our business model is built around research and development and then commercialization. Dell's business is supply chain. It doesn't make computers. It manages a supply chain. So having its suppliers around it makes sense.

Chabon: Paul's comment is well taken. Dell is a different kind of model. What works for it doesn't work necessarily for a pharmaceutical company or a food-packaging company or another consumer-products company.

Martin: You pick up valuable concepts from the other models, some of which you can customize for your own benefit.

What are the supply-chain trends?

Martin: I see a trend to increase efficiency using technology to maintain customer service while taking cost out of the operation and increasing speed. Increasingly, the total cost of supply-chain management is considered.

Clayton: We've optimized the supply chain and find it fairly cost-efficient internally. What we're looking at now is extending that to the broader enterprise, involving our suppliers and trying to understand what our customers really require and looking at the total end-to-end supply-chain cost to get products to customers as quickly as we can.

Plemmons: It's no longer enough to deliver our shipment on time and damage free. Our customers are looking to limit the number of suppliers, and they expect more out of them.

Eagar: Technology that's coming into play now plays a big role in our operations, and that is the transfer of information, not just between the cargo principals but the multiple stake holders in the business--the cargo principal, the shipper, manufacturer, agent, broker.

What are the technology changes?

Martin: At R.J. Reynolds, we're coming from a midyear implementation of a software tool to integrate business transactions all the way from order to cash. It has enabled a seamless integration of large amounts of data. We're in the process of organizing job roles around the data availability and having fewer handoffs.

Clayton: We took our number of logistics-service providers from more than 30 to three for interplant shipments and shipments from our...