Since the dawn of time, we’ve all known that two halves make a whole. Yin and yang, peanut butter and jelly, Siskel and Ebert. It is all about synergy; igniting new ideas and partaking in unexpected debates that lead to revolutionary breakthroughs. The byproduct? Financial results. In today’s enterprise market, the two halves are the supply chain professional (or end-user) ...

Think of a monorail as a people mover, and it’s easy to imagine all sorts of people inside. In the same way, a monorail used for material handling can move a great variety of products, parts and components in the manufacturing and distribution environment. Typically mounted to an overhead structure or ceiling, monorail systems help lift and transport heavy items ...

Order fulfillment solutions are progressing to new levels, as manufacturers have become “truly focused on reducing end-user labor utilization and improving accuracy, throughputs and ROI,” says Ed Romaine, vice president sales and marketing at MHI member SI Systems. Romaine and Austin Power, business development manager, MHI member Retrotech, led an Order Fulfillment Solutions (OFS) Council educational seminar on the “latest ...

Although automation and use of robots to improve efficiency, productivity and employee safety are the norm throughout the manufacturing industry, the warehouse and distribution industry has been slower to adopt automation technology. While the same benefits of automation apply, barriers such as cost justification, flexibility of systems and lack of awareness of emerging technologies are reasons for continued reliance on ...

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 ...