Industry 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.

It is now clear that the supply chain transparency and resilience provided by digital innovation is the difference-maker between companies that can respond, recover and thrive when disruption hits and those that cannot. COVID will not be the last disruption and future survival depends on investment in innovation driven resilience. This issue of MHI Solutions focuses on the top technologies ...

By John Paxton, CEO, MHI Digital supply chain innovation has been the common theme over the last eight MHI Annual Industry Reports. However, the pandemic drove home the necessity of digital innovation as a core supply chain competency—and it has catapulted this opportunity to the top of CEOs’ agendas. For some, the pandemic served as a proof of concept for ...

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 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 Sheryl S. Jackson In the quest to improve productivity, decrease costs and enhance safety in the warehouse or distribution facility, owners and managers look to a variety of equipment, technology and training. There is, however, one area that usually does not top the list of actions considered essential for performance improvement. “Batteries and battery charging technology are often overlooked ...

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 ...