Driverless vehicles, drones, 3-D printing and wearable technology certainly beckon for supply chains. But before moving on to the latest in whiz-bang gadgetry, a stabilizing question: Just how “optimized” are your network and inventories first? If you’re missing the connection, the recent 2015 MHI Annual Industry Report spoke of numerous emerging technologies expected to transform traditional supply chain models in ...

Moving a roll of cloth destined for military uniforms from manufacturer to warehouse to fabricator has been, until recently, a time-consuming, labor-intensive process. The introduction of automatic identification—specifically Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)—has transformed it. Manufacturing employees used to handwrite each cloth roll’s data onto manually attached tags. At the warehouse, employees would copy each roll’s information onto a sheet by ...

Mobile technologies are improving processes within each step of the supply chain—and expediting real-time communication for better visibility across the entire chain. An increasing number of manufacturers are outsourcing some or all of their supply chain management to third-party logistics providers, which are leveraging mobile technologies to report performance metrics—as well as potential problems—to their clients in real time, says ...

In addition to examining the eight innovative technologies anticipated to help meet companies’ struggles to meet customer demands for faster, better service at lower costs, the 2015 MHI Annual Industry Report: Supply chain innovation – Making the impossible possible acknowledges that the skill sets of the workers supporting them must be equally as sophisticated as the technologies themselves. Simply finding ...

In the U.S. and international auto industry, the wheels are spinning. That cliché takes on multiple meanings in today’s automotive manufacturing sector. There are the new ideas that come from a technological revolution and infotainment that is common place in today’s vehicles. Then there’s the lack of traction that comes when pressure from regulators— pushing for more fuel efficiency and ...

Have you noticed how logistics and distribution activities tend to be concentrated in certain regions? This is actually a key trend that is transforming global supply chains. Yossi Sheffi from the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics wrote a book about this movement in 2012, called Logistics Clusters. He describes a logistics cluster as “an agglomeration of logistics activities in ...

The second half of 2015 is likely to be characterized by a solid U.S. economy, an improving global economy, modestly increasing commodity prices and continued foreign exchange rate volatility. Despite the deceleration in U.S. growth in Q4 2014 and Q1 2015, we still expect solid year-over-year U.S. economic growth for all of 2015, as well as continued improvements in the ...

Perhaps this article caught your eye because your supply chain strategy is not generating the results you expect and need, or perhaps it’s because you know that you need to completely transform your supply chain. Perhaps your supply chain routinely fails to deliver products on time and manage inventory and cost to the right levels. Maybe you realize that the ...

Our economic expectations have not changed in the past quarter; we still expect solid U.S. economic growth in 2015. This growth is likely to be accompanied by downside risks to global growth, benign materials costs that rise later in the year, and volatile foreign exchange markets. While we previously acknowledged elevated risks to global growth in the first half of ...

Despite the introduction of robotic and other mechanical means of moving materials, manual material handling (MMH) is still an essential part of the supply chain process. To minimize the injuries from the repetitive motion involved in MMH means companies must introduce ergonomic interventions. Two major factors impact the need to improve MMH methods: the available pool of workers and market ...