What’s keeping you up at night?” It’s the question we’ve all been trained to ask when we want to understand the big challenges that our colleagues are facing. And for supply chain executives these days, the answers almost always involve people. How do we find, train and retain the talent that we need to sustain and grow our companies? The ...

In addition to 2015 marking the 70th anniversary of MHI, it is also the 30th anniversary of MHI-sponsored ProMat. At its core, ProMat provides attendees with access to the latest material handling, logistics equipment and technologies. But it has also evolved to become an internationally revered brand that represents the largest expo for manufacturing and supply chain professionals in North ...

MHI has a strong history of bringing member companies together into groups focused on specific products (Product Groups). MHI is now dedicating additional resources to the development of Solution Groups. MHI Solution Groups will be the industry standard for collaboration among end-users and material handling product manufacturers and service providers. The goal is to bring the industry together to collaborate ...

Visibility throughout the supply chain has routinely topped supply chain leaders’ list of critical needs, but the actual implementation of strategies designed to achieve end-to-end visibility has not been evident—until now. “Studies conducted by Gartner two years ago demonstrated supply chain executives’ concern about the need for visibility throughout the supply chain, but it wasn’t until this year that we ...

With all the hype about the Internet of Things, it wouldn’t take much to feel, well, left out of things. Before panic sets in, a word from the experts: Even though the idea of an interconnected—and perhaps automated—world of sensor-led devices that can freely transfer data over a shared network keeps making headlines, it’s still not reality. “To be clear, ...

Professor Benoit Montreuil looks at today’s logistics systems and sees inefficiencies and unsustainable practices. Trucks and shipping containers frequently travel empty or only half full. Products sit in warehouses that are poorly utilized, far from the end customers, resulting in unsold or unused merchandise. There is no fast and reliable multi-modal transportation. System-wide automation is not economically feasible because of ...

Big data—the vast amounts of information that businesses, companies and organizations collect and store about inventory, operations, customers, vendors, sales and other transactions—and the challenges associated with strategically processing it play a key role in the operation of today’s most successful supply chains. Companies that figure out how best to harness the capture, storage, management and analysis of big data ...

The numbers in the aerospace industry speak volumes: Aerospace manufacturers produced $162 billion worth of gas turbine-powered aircraft in 2013, according to Peter Zimm, a principal with ICF International, a consulting firm that works in the aviation industry. Zimm anticipates continued growth of 2.3 percent per year over the next decade. The industry’s dominant manufacturers—Boeing and Airbus—each have eight-year production ...

If the experts are right, in a few years we’ll look back at 2014 as “the good ole’ days for recruiting.” Over the next few years we are expecting the U.S. workforce to shrink dramatically. It is really a perfect storm…60 million Baby Boomers are retiring, with only 40 million new workers coming in to the workforce. And the participation ...

In 2015, MHI will introduce Solution Groups to its offering of product-specific Industry Groups. Solution Groups will collect information on trends and issues from the market and provide solutions and thought leadership, enabling MHI and its member companies to be the authoritative resource on material handling and supply chain topics. “We see this as an effective approach for engaging the end-user ...