Archive: Nov 2009

Selecting a Voice-Directed Picking System

If you want to reduce errors, improve productivity, and increase accuracy in the warehouse, a voice-directed picking system may help. Choosing the right product to meet your company’s needs, however, can be a challenge. Donal Mac Daid, vice president of product marketing at Atlanta-based logistics software provider Aldata Solution Inc., offers advice on selecting voice-directed […]

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Selecting Pallet Types: One Size Does Not Fit All

At any given time, nearly 1.5 billion pallets transport products of all shapes and sizes throughout the United States. The majority are wood pallets, which have remained popular with supply chain and logistics managers for decades because they cost less than alternative pallets made of plastic or steel. Because pallets are used across several diverse […]

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Just Say No to Slow-Mo

When the economy slows, so does the pace of shipments. To cut costs, some companies shift to less-expensive deferred delivery services. But there are cases where speed helps reduce overall costs, even when economic activity is flat. Here’s one example that bucks the slow-mo shipment trend line. Acoording to press reports, an Australian retailer, Coles […]

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Uncommon Ground

Ground carriers redefine expedited services to meet new delivery and security demands in a down economy.

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Relieving The Holiday Hangover

Retail madness doesn’t stop at year’s end—it just reverses direction. A medicine chest of reverse logistics remedies helps alleviate retailers’ inventory headaches.

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Wind Power Logistics: Tilting Toward Wind Turbines

Wind machines have been spinning imagination and innovation for centuries, but only now is past fancy and contemporary fabrication melding into a composite reality for U.S. industry. Where wind blows, economic promise follows. The wind energy industry is taking over the world and the United States is center stage in an unfolding drama.

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Global Logistics—November 2009

Wagons West Chinas New Reckoning Sometimes adversity yields opportunity. When a major earthquake struck China’s Sichuan Province in May 2008, its magnitude was incomprehensible: 70,000 people killed, many more displaced, and widespread annihilation of infrastructure and socio-economic wellbeing. But a landscape literally wasted by nature is now quaking and awakening with the tremors of a […]

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Software Tools Optimize Green Logistics

By now most third-party logistics (3PL) service providers, big and small, have jumped on the sustainability bandwagon. They’re reducing ship and truck speeds, designing and restructuring warehouses to cut power consumption, implementing bio-fuels, packing products with reusable and environmentally friendly packaging, and consolidating freight for full truckload runs. But they could be doing more. Maybe […]

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Cliff Hooper: X-Ray Image

Cliff Hooper has been managing inventories since high school. He started out working for a firm that installed and serviced jukeboxes, pinball games, and slot machines. Later, he applied his logistics smarts to aircraft and war planning functions for the U.S. Air Force, and to missile and radar systems for Hughes Aircraft Company. More recently, […]

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The Intellectual Risk of Complexity

The rules of business in a global world are thorny and often intractable. As supply chains grow more complex and outsourcing gains favor, long-range risks become harder to judge, or even understand. One consequence of a complex global supply chain is a subtle shift in the nature of intellectual property and how it factors into […]

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