Piedmont Natural Gas, a natural gas utility serving customers in the Carolinas and Tennessee for more than 60 years, may seem at first blush to have little in common with Digital Lumens, a six-year-old Boston company specializing in “intelligent” computerized LED lighting systems. Both companies, however, are among those staking positions in an alternative-energy universe that should surge as more ...

As the U.S. economy was beginning to recover in 2010, researchers at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics were having a busy year. They published a number of studies looking at trends and technologies transforming global supply chains. Mixed in among these publications was a whitepaper with a shockingly personal and simple title: “Are You Prepared for the Supply ...

There’s a lot of chatter in the supply chain and material handling industries centered on innovation. MHI wanted to separate the buzz from the actual, day-to-day reality experienced by supply chain managers. So, at the end of 2013, we teamed up with Deloitte to conduct a survey crafted to verify the importance of current and emerging innovations—directly from the trenches. ...

The Rack Manufacturers Institute (RMI) celebrated its 50th anniversary back in 2008, but the organization has not been content to rest upon five decades of achievement. RMI’s 22 members—the companies that produce most of industrial storage racks installed in the U.S.—continue to work hard to improve their industry through research, consensus building and education. RMI is an affiliated trade association ...

The supply chain represents as much as 40 percent of the operating costs of hospitals, the second-largest expense after labor. The average hospital carries 8,000 stock keeping units (SKUs) of in-house inventory and owns up to 35,000 SKUs end-to-end. The supplies a hospital requires run the spectrum from medication, artificial knees, operating tables, wheelchairs, intravenous solutions, wound dressings to bed ...

Competition has always been fierce in retail. But as retailers continue to contend for greater customer loyalty and a larger share of the market, those in shipping and material handling are finding themselves racing to keep up with demands for ever-faster delivery. “In the last years, humans are getting used to a much higher level of service,” said Marc van ...

Pop quiz: A customer in Atlanta orders a tie from a retailer’s e-commerce site. One tie is located in a distribution center (DC) on the outskirts of town. Three more are located in the flagship store in New York. Which tie should get picked to fulfill that order? In today’s world of retail, the simplest answer—choosing the closest tie—may not ...

During the past decade public-private partnerships (P3s) have built some vital transportation and infrastructure projects in the U.S. Now a similar cooperative approach is being applied to an entirely different sector—manufacturing. Regional manufacturing innovation institutes are bringing together the resources of private industry, colleges and universities, associations, research institutions and federal, state and local governments in an effort to boost ...

Supply chain leaders hold the key to success or failure for businesses that want to capitalize on the $30 trillion opportunity presented by emerging markets according to a report by research firm Gartner Inc. The importance of supply chain management in emerging countries is reiterated in the findings of a global survey of business leaders for Deloitte Consulting’s Business Trends ...

“Polar vortex” was the trending term this past winter. But even as the meteorological catch phrase burned up the Twitter feeds, its frigid weather iced up the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) and other indexes. Manufacturing was slowed by the record cold. Despite that, though, the current data has most business sectors either sitting pretty or on an uptick. U.S. economic ...