Articles
Commentary
Freight Mode Optimization: When to Shift Between Road, Sea, and Air in a Volatile Market
Freight markets remain unpredictable, with rates fluctuating, capacity tightening, and disruption affecting all modes at different times. For businesses moving goods within the UK and internationally, transport decisions can no longer be treated as fixed. They require regular review and adjustment in line with changing conditions. What Is Freight Mode Optimization? Freight mode optimization refers […]
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You’re Pitching a Cargo Heist Movie. What’s the Title and Plot Synopsis?
THE DRINKS ARE ON THEM: A wisecracking trucker and misfit crew swipe limited-edition glow-in-the-dark tequila, livestreaming their clout-chasing escape. A relentless sheriff is on their tail while fan meetups and stunt gags snowball. Their bumbling hype-man geotags the hideout for a brand deal. Cops crash the party instead, turning neon toasts into silver cuffs.
WRITTEN BY Ann Stawski
DIRECTOR OF Marketing & Communications
Odyssey Logistics
The Next Great Convergence in Global Commerce: DPP, Ambient IoT, and GS1
Global businesses are standing at the edge of a new era in supply chain visibility and product intelligence. As the European Union begins implementing Digital Product Passport (DPP) requirements across key sectors, companies must prepare for a future in which every product is expected to carry a dynamic, digital record of its lifecycle. These mandates are already influencing how products are being designed, manufactured, tracked, and verified across global supply chains.
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Building an Automation-Ready Warehouse Workforce in a Volatile Labor Market
Why workforce readiness—not technology alone—has become the defining factor in warehouse resilience.
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Inside Job: Embedding Risk Protection Where Freight Decisions Happen
For decades, cargo insurance has been an afterthought in freight operations, an administrative box to tick after rates are negotiated and the load is on the move. That separation made sense when every policy required phone calls, paperwork, and manual underwriting. But in a digital, data-driven supply chain, risk protection can no longer live outside the workflow. It belongs inside it.
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WHAT’S THE WORD: The Language of Logistics
From refreshers to recently coined terms and emerging concepts (should we be concerned about shadow AI?), here are some quick definitions to add to your logistics dictionary.
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Real-Time Sales Data: The Missing Link
Despite progress in supply chain digitization, automation, and AI, one gap undermines sales efficiency: real-time sales data sharing between retailers and suppliers. This disconnect creates forecasting challenges, burdens inventory systems, and slows responsiveness at a time when speed and agility are critical for competitiveness.
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Follow This Roadmap To a Lean, Sustainable Supply Chain
Few companies realize that, when implemented in the supply chain, Lean and Green are not contradictory but can be mutually beneficial. This is a good reason for firms to adopt an integrated Lean and Green strategy.
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Renewable Energy Fuels the Future
Renewable energy is becoming an increasingly essential component of sustainable supply chains for many interconnected reasons that address both environmental imperatives and business realities.
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Seeing Around the Next Bend
Global supply networks involve many partners and recent shocks have shown how quickly a single disruption can ripple through the system. Traditional visibility stitched together data from transportation, warehouse, and enterprise systems and augmented it with GPS or RFID tags; those tools provide only snapshots of past movements.
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Are Humans in “The Loop” of Your Future-fit Strategy?
I recently counseled a stealth startup on its go-to-market strategy. It’s a familiar story—Silicon Valley-based, computer science DNA, venture capital funding, and an ambition to jump on the AI train and automate backend processes better than predecessors.
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Foresight and Flexibility: Winning in a Constrained Semiconductor Market
Amidst a memory chip shortage, maintaining a long-term view on cost versus continuity will not only weather this cycle but gain a competitive advantage in the market that follows.
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Powering Progress with Electrification
The utility sector is at the heart of an electrification wave. As societies pivot from fossil fuels to electricity, utilities and power generation companies are not just managing grids; they are driving the charge. Power providers are being asked to deliver more electricity than ever—faster, cleaner, and more reliably—while modernizing outdated infrastructure and contending with fragile global supply chains.
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Deploying Physical AI for Smarter, Safer Inbound Logistics
Physical AI will transform many aspects of the supply chain. Starting with a small, focused inbound logistics use case now can make your warehouse operations more efficient, accurate, and safe, as well as help your organization build the skills needed to extend Physical AI into other areas of your business.
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How Data Can Fix Demand Matching
Supply-demand mismatches are more than just inconvenient; they are costly. From inflated transportation spend to missed SLAs, poor alignment erodes both profitability and customer trust. The solution? Advanced analytics, not just for hindsight, but for foresight and real-time agility.
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Enabling Smarter Government Logistics
If I have learned one thing in my decades of navigating defense logistics, it’s that we can’t afford to solve tomorrow’s readiness problems with yesterday’s systems. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the first new technology with the viability to change how we forecast demand, manage obsolescence, and optimize supply chains. But the path to realizing its potential is met with structural, cultural, and bureaucratic hurdles.
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7 Principles That Make Strategic Relationships Work
Over my years of being part of the third-party logistics discipline, I have often seen and heard shipper/3PL relationships characterized as a marriage. This is a fitting characterization, given the covenant nature and commitment of these strategic business agreements.
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Crises in the Middle East Call for a New Approach in Supply Chain Resilience
By focusing on four key strategic imperatives — identifying risks, understanding their origins, and knowing when and how to activate resilience measures — businesses can transform their Middle East and global supply chains and seek competitive advantage.
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Random Stow or the Disorganized Warehouse?
Random Stow is a warehouse putaway method driven by an algorithm developed by Coupang, an ecommerce monster and formidable Amazon competitor. For the Korean market, Coupang uses this counterintuitive warehouse management method, which stores items wherever there is open shelf space, rather than grouping similar SKUs together. The warehouse might look disorganized. But it is […]
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How Agentic AI Is Redefining Route Optimization in Last-Mile Delivery
Traditional route optimization generates plans based on the data you give it. Agentic AI takes those plans and manages them through execution, making adjustments as new information arrive.
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