Articles
Commentary
Fulfillment and Logistics Drive Retail Customer Loyalty
While the majority of retailers experienced fulfillment disruptions this past holiday season, retailers that provided alternative ways for customers to get their gifts on time, and later, return items with ease, stood out as innovative and reliable. Moving forward, fulfillment and logistics will increasingly become the battleground for customer loyalty even as business conditions normalize. […]
Read MoreThe Rail Networks of Tomorrow Will Ride on Satellite Connectivity
Railways are critical in supporting the global movement of goods in remote areas. However, today’s railway operators face many challenges, including optimizing network capacity, carrying out vital maintenance work, and improving health and safety. In their ambition to achieve greater control over their assets, transport leaders are now deploying more advanced technologies across their networks, […]
Read MoreAgility Over Forecasting: Three Steps to a More Agile Supply Chain
For years, forecasting has been a staple of supply chain management, especially within the consumer packaged goods industry. As 2020 has taught us, however, there are events that forecasting cannot even remotely prepare for. Planners have felt the pain during COVID-19, when they’ve had to scrap forecasting models day after day due to the constant, […]
Read MoreDoes Lean Have a Limit?
Since the 1980s, the supply chain industry has enthusiastically embraced just-in-time (JIT) inventory management and lean manufacturing in the search for cost optimization. This resulted in highly streamlined processes and impressive efficiencies. But in the past year, we’ve seen there are limits to lean operations—one being we need the ability to adapt quickly when unexpected […]
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What’s the supply chain buzzword of 2021?
AGILITY Companies must be nimble in their approach to logistics and warehousing operations. Corporations that embrace agility can quickly maneuver and clear roadblocks when disruptions arise. —Grant Koch Solutions & Innovation Director BDP International Over the past 12 months, we have seen disruptions within an already challenging global logistics supply chain. Traditional seasonal patterns and […]
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Supply Chain: An Engine of Post-Pandemic Growth
Growth has been hard to find for consumer goods companies in recent years. The majority of food and beverage businesses, for instance, are seeing growth of less than 3% according to Accenture’s analysis. And across industry segments, growth has been trending downward for five years now, culminating in the unprecedented disruption of 2020.
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A Supply Chain for the Next Normal
The fluctuating economy over the past year impacted how companies across industries responded in a pinch. Now that crisis responses have passed and the pandemic settled into a new normal, many companies are looking for ways to adapt their long-term supply chain strategy for the unexpected.
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GM & Kroger: Transformers
The interconnection between advanced manufacturing, automation, and supply chain management had a boost in the past year. Part of that boost was due to the virus economy, but most was due to the genius and creativity of those seeking solutions to tough business challenges amplified by ever-evolving customer demands. Transformation. Just as the silo-crashing impact […]
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What’s your best importing or exporting advice?
In order to maximize efficiencies throughout the supply chain, logistics should be viewed from 30,000 feet above and decisions should be made by considering the entire process. Imports, exports, and all modes of transportation are reliant on the connecting nodes. It’s an ecosystem where sustainability is key.
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Meat Importer Carves Out Success
The meat supply chain starts at the farm gate and goes to the dinner table, making several sea, land, and air freight connections until it arrives at a local distributor, which serves either the retail or food service (restaurant) markets, but typically not both.
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Can Your Supply Chain Withstand the Unexpected?
Today’s supply chain is vast, expanding to every corner of the globe. With this expansion, the threat has increased significantly due to the larger attack surface. Add to that a global pandemic and the need to protect the supply chain has never been more important.
Read More3 Vital Steps Toward Contactless Supply Chains
Members of the supply chain are the unsung heroes of 2020. The chain kept goods moving throughout the country, even as the pandemic reached a fever-pitch. Each member adapted to new pressures and demands. Working to accommodate new requirements the best they could. However, just like other industries discovered this year, the supply chain unearthed […]
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Omnichannel Delivers, But at What Cost?
Amazon, the most successful e-commerce company of all, gained a competitive advantage through its two-day free delivery for Prime customers. Many other pure e-tailers and brick-and-mortar retailers moving to omnichannel retail—where customers engage with companies in a variety of ways, including in a physical store, or via websites and mobile apps—have followed suit to some degree.
Read MoreOvercoming the Returns Challenge
The world of e-commerce shows no sign of slowing down. As parcel volumes soar and businesses strive to meet customer delivery expectations, returns services can, and have been, easily overlooked. Considering that in some sectors, such as fashion, returns can be as high as 45% and in the United States, customers are 3x more likely […]
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The President’s 2021 Trade Policy
The Biden Administration’s new trade policy report is filled with laudable goals such as beating COVID-19, American family relief, and the Build Back Better initiative. But should these goals be the basis of U.S. trade policy or negotiating position with other countries? Do our economic competitors enter into trade negotiations with the United States with […]
Read MoreSilencing Self-Doubt and Building the Next Generation of Women Leaders
This year’s International Women’s Day got me thinking about the challenges I have faced throughout my finance and logistics career. While routinely being the only female in meetings has never intimidated me, I have experienced moments when an idea or question I’ve posed was overlooked, only to be raised by a male colleague and then […]
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5 Steps to Process Improvement
I was involved in logistics and transportation for more than 25 years and spent the last 16 of those years with a large apparel corporation’s private fleet. During that time, I cannot remember a single year when the private fleet did not have to defend its existence. Each year the argument seemed to escalate until the cost reductions started.
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FTL vs. LTL: What’s the Difference?
Understanding these seven key differences between shipping full truckload (FTL) and less than truckload (LTL) allows shippers to achieve the best possible results and support planning.
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4 Strategies for Effective Cross-Border Logistics
With a wave of overseas supplier disruptions due to COVID-19 and resulting supply shortages that bottlenecked operations across the supply chain, many companies are considering nearshoring to Canada and Mexico to minimize risk and potential disruptions.
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If you were writing a book on the supply chain in 2020, what would you call it?
The Shift from Efficient to Effective. 2020 was a gut punch to any supply chain organization that pursued operational efficiency without keeping a pulse on the risk factors that threaten disruption. Effective supply chains designed out risk by addressing safety, security, and reliability vulnerabilities. —John Reichert, Senior Director, Supply Chain Execution Solutions, Tecsys The Wake-Up […]
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