Articles
Checking In
From a Modest Beginning
Having covered logistics for more than four decades, Inbound Logistics has promoted and encouraged companies to adopt demand-driven logistics practices, and reported their progress driving the evolution of traffic management to supply chain management. The key development in that process was accepting a sea change in business management: Don’t plan and push your product at […]
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Think Big, Act Small
Business disruption is creating disproportionate opportunity for mid-size forwarders, logistics solutions providers, and 3PLs. The maxim “He who is closer to the customer wins” is in play here. Says who? A recent survey by Barclays/BOD on the state of logistics confidence levels finds that “larger companies have generally found things more difficult than smaller ones, […]
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Do You Like Raspberries?
Initial and erroneous reporting on a Wuhan wet market renewed a focus on food supply chain management, or FSCM. The virus episode reminds us that reputations of food value chain partners—vendors, transport providers, governments, buyers, and retailers—can and will be severely damaged by any food chain fail. Twenty-three million people get sick from unsafe food […]
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The World Is Your Warehouse 3.0
In a column I wrote 20 years ago called "Millennium Musings," I used the phrase "make the world your warehouse." It took two decades, but it appears that we may be on the cusp of that actually happening, not just in developed countries, but across the entire world. How? Enter Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, […]
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A Plan for Freight Excellence
The U.S. Department of Transportation took many by surprise recently when it introduced the first-ever National Freight Strategic Plan (NFSP), designed to upgrade the American freight system and maintain the country’s competitive edge. Anyone who has been around our industry as long as I have has seen federal initiatives that address transportation inequities without moving […]
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Let’s Not Forget
Virus Times has reminded us that we have the capacity to quickly adopt "new" technologies, adapt to new working conditions, and remain highly productive. Certainly the "new" technologies for collaborative work are not really new. They are new just to a large swath of workers who had no reason to Zoom under pre-COVID-19 working conditions. […]
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What Can 3PLs Do?
Can third-party logistics (3PL) providers bring chaos to order? Or order to chaos? For starters, they can help you wrangle and bring some order to the current COVID-caused confusion in your logistics process. We’ve been reporting on how logistics partners can help you solve complicated business challenges and leverage opportunities long before “3PL” was a […]
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In Defense of You
You’ve failed at logistics. So says David Segal in his recent article entitled "What Happened to the Great American Logistics Machine?" in The New York Times. Here are the article’s punchlines: The virus is "winning at the logistics game," and "let us acknowledge the obvious: The country is flunking a curriculum that it basically wrote." […]
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Staying Productive in Unproductive Times
While driving around my neighborhood, I’ve noticed a lot more people putting items out to the curb. Have you noticed this? I wondered about that for a moment and then realized what was happening. People are using the virus downtime to organize, clean, and take up projects long postponed. The result is an uptick in […]
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Now They Know
Some search categories on the Inbound Logistics platform are up more than 108%. What are companies looking for? Logistics solutions, such as more carrier lift in certain areas, fulfillment help, warehouse solutions, transportation management technology, and 3PL solutions, to name a few. The scramble for logistics solutions and expertise is on. Everyone needs what you […]
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