Global Trends

Being resilient is almost a given if you are a woman who has achieved success and a leadership position in the supply chain industry. So, who better to ask about achieving resiliency, especially when it comes to personal challenges, but also how they have applied those lessons to organizational resilience factors, as well?

Each year, the results of the 2021 MHI Annual Industry Report contain some surprises, almost like the running of the Kentucky Derby, where the winner oftentimes is not the horse you expected. This year’s report, Innovation Driven Resilience follows true. While some of the results are typical and much like previous years, there are a few surprises.

During the April 13 keynote at ProMatDX, American Logistics Aid Network’s Kathy Fulton and a panel of supply chain thought-leaders from Clorox, FedEX and C&S Grocers explored lessons learned from the pandemic and how building long-term resiliency into supply chain and logistics operations will be key to adapting and recovering when future disruption or disaster strikes.

By Mary Lou Jay “I think of visibility as akin to being able to simply see something. But transparency literally means to see through something and how it connects to other things. Transparency is like the extra medical information you would get if you had access to an X-ray,” said Darren Prokop, professor of logistics at the College of Business ...

By David Coburn Over the span of a few days last March, COVID-19 created an urgent need for organizations of all kinds to communicate critical information to their employees. Suddenly, the economic and operational challenges presented by the virus had workers fretting about everything from new sanitizing and social distancing protocols for offices, distribution centers and factory floors to the ...

. By Sara Pearson Specter Before the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus was declared a pandemic by The World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, pharmaceutical companies and governments worldwide were already creating plans to develop, manufacture and distribute vaccines to the global population. Within two months, the U.S. had announced the formation of Operation Warp Speed, ...

By Tom Gresham In today’s corporate landscape, sustainability has fast developed into a necessary point of emphasis. Experts say a key ingredient to pursuing sustainability in a meaningful way is transparency in the supply chain, where much of a company’s environmental impact lies. Gopal Iyer, supply chain delivery lead at procurement consultancy 4C Associates, said he has seen estimates indicating ...

Companies big and small continue to invest in emerging supply chain technologies in a major way. Blockchain along with radio frequency identification (RFID) asset-tracking technology, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and quick response (QR) codes are all technologies promising to provide transparency, efficiency and cost savings to players at each end of the supply chain and every ...

By Nick Fortuna Modern supply chains are too complicated for any one company to do everything well, so strategic partnerships are key to solving the big problems facing the material handling industry and its customers. The right partnerships make business relationships more transparent, resilient and sustainable because customers get to work with best-of-breed providers working in their individual areas of ...

By Jennifer Pazour, Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Agility, the ability to move quickly and easily, is a powerful, and some may say necessary, skill for success in today’s supply chains. This need for agile decision-making is changing how organizations acquire warehousing and distribution capabilities. An emerging, more flexible option is on-demand warehousing, which enables ...