Industry Trends

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 ...

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 ...

Building the future doesn’t always come naturally to people. Too often, we are harshly confronted or otherwise assaulted by a changing present before it registers that our future will be different. And we need to do something about it now. Material handling and logistics are not exempt from this. Fortunately, some of the early detection work of what the future ...

Adaptable. Vital. Inclusive. Three words you might not typically hear to describe an organization celebrating its 70th anniversary in 2015. And yet, those are just a few of the descriptors used by three of MHI’s board members when discussing some of the reasons behind our association’s continued importance to the supply chain, material handling and logistics industries. What started in ...

Back in March, at MODEX 2014, we released the MHI Annual Industry Report: Innovations That Drive Supply Chains. That report, which is still available as a free download on www.MHI.org, was the first of a series of yearly studies that MHI has partnered with Deloitte to conduct. The Annual Industry Report separates the buzz from the reality surrounding five hot ...

Third-party logistics (3PL) providers offer their customers the opportunity to outsource some, or all, of their supply chain management functions. These might include warehousing, transportation, or even value-added services—such as goods procurement, kitting of parts or products, traceability and compliance, spare parts and production tooling supply, reverse logistics, repairs and more. Over the past three decades use of 3PLs has ...

It was 14 years ago that Dr. C John Langley, now professor of supply chain management at Penn State and director of development for the Center for Supply Chain Research at Smeal College of Business, laid out the seven immutable laws of collaborative logistics. “Immutable” turned out to be the key word. Despite how much has changed in terms of ...

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 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 ...