Articles
Commentary
How to Wirelessly Enable Your Supply Chain
Just in time is challenging enough. It’s even more so when it involves high-value assets such as construction, forestry, and agricultural equipment. That was the case at one major U.S. manufacturer who supplied those kinds of equipment. For years, the company’s supply chain used specialized containers to shuttle work-in-process inventory between multiple suppliers and manufacturing […]
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You Say You Want a Co-Evolution?
In human evolution, scientists theorize that primitive man existed 3.8 million years ago. Progress was slow until 200,000 years ago, when modern man made his appearance. Then came a spark of progress: animal domestication, farming, global expansion, refined toolmaking, and more. What we today call the third-party logistics (3PL) sector followed that same evolutionary process. […]
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Turning Back the Pages: 20 Years of Top 100 3PLs
Where were you in 1996? Working your way up the transportation ladder? Starting a career in the logistics field? On the outside looking in? Still in high school? Grade school? Every once in a while it’s fun to throw it back—to an earlier time and reflect on where we come from, where we’ve been, cause […]
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6 Global Supply Chain Challenges To Ignore at Your Own Risk
Along with the many benefits that come from sourcing outside the United States, such as low-cost manufacturing, several issues must be properly managed to ensure a successful supply chain. Finding a rock-bottom price in China or India is not the problem, but landing great costs while avoiding distance, timing, quality, and language problems can be […]
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3PLs Can Deliver Big Benefits to Small Companies
No group has benefitted more from the explosion of e-commerce than small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Still, the perception is often that SMBs deal only in personal, face-to-face interactions between customers and business owners in a brick-and-mortar store. While that personal touch is still very much alive, e-commerce has fundamentally changed and expanded the number […]
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The Human Touch: New Ergonomic Initiatives Sustain Employee Efficiency
Today’s global supply chains must support constant market changes while also sustaining productivity. In order to achieve this, supply chain leaders are executing several strategies, including implementing ergonomic initiatives that minimize risks for production employees on the job. In production environments, ergonomics plays a direct role in employee performance, which translates into production sustainability. Ergonomics […]
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Rise of the Machines: How Self-Driving Trucks Will Alter the Supply Chain
If you drive through Nevada on your family vacation this summer, you may glimpse what many believe is the future of trucking in this country. Daimler’s Freightliner division unveiled its first self-driving truck licensed for commercial use in Nevada, one of the first states to permit autonomous passenger vehicles and the only one to license […]
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Supply Chain + Marketing = Successful Consumer Promotions
More consumer-facing companies are using promotions as a way to attract and retain customers, try new product concepts, and meet consumer demand.Examples include limited-time food offerings in restaurants, holiday-inspired product colors, and co-branded promotions at big box retailers and grocers. These promotions give marketers, product developers, and salespeople an additional avenue to express creativity and […]
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4 Ways to Ensure Your Valuable Shipments Arrive Safely
Every shipment contains something of value to the sender and receiver. That package may have an extraordinarily high monetary value with little emotional equity, or incredibly high emotional value for the recipient but little financial worth. For example, let’s take a shipment containing temperature- or time-sensitive pharmaceuticals for patients in a new drug trial. The […]
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Ready to Reduce Your Footprint? Start by Taking These 5 Steps
For resource-intensive organizations, conservation and environmental initiatives are more than feel-good activities. Environmental stewardship can ease regulatory and compliance burdens, reduce effort and waste, and increase profit margins. Yet, many companies still struggle to justify green efforts. Implementing an environmental initiative in your business can be more than just an exercise in sustainability. The program […]
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Benchmarking Transportation Processes With TMS Data
Many businesses that ship products use transportation management systems (TMS) for visibility and control within their supply chain operations. The introduction of cloud-based TMS has also opened the door to many small and mid-sized companies to find great tools that fit their budgets. While using TMS capabilities to support everything from carrier rate management, shipment […]
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Start Now to Leverage the Benefits of the Panama Canal Expansion
The expansion of the Panama Canal, scheduled between late 2015 and early 2016, is one of the most important infrastructure projects of the past century. The upgrades mean that massive post-Panamax ships will traverse the waterway, leading to a significant shift in trade patterns and increased global trade. Global companies typically grow 15 percent faster, […]
Read MoreWhy Ports Need a Master Plan
Ports constitute an important economic hub and critical economic engines, bringing varying degrees of benefit to the international, regional, and local economies in which they operate. In a sense, ports are much like living organisms. In biology, organisms are defined as contiguous living systems, which, in at least some form, are capable of response to […]
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What Customers Expect in the E-Commerce Age
Twenty years ago, selling and delivering retail goods to consumers was a relatively simple process. Nearly all purchases were made in stores, so if a retailer adequately stocked its shelves with desirable, dependable goods, shoppers were usually satisfied. If they weren’t, they often had limited options, depending on how far they had to travel to […]
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Inventory Replenishment: Why Push When You Can Pull?
Today‘s supply chains are undergoing significant pressures to become more demand-driven. Retailers, distributors, and manufacturers must choose the approach they hope will make the most profit. Should you produce goods according to demand forecasts, or by reacting to what consumers already bought? Companies are investing in a new generation of cloud technologies that enable the […]
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Three Tips for Doing Business in Canada
Canada offers a unique opportunity for American businesses looking to sell products into new and profitable markets. Canada shares a border with the U.S. that spans 5,525 miles, and entered the North American Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. and Mexico on January 1, 1994. Since then, Canada has purchased a significant number of American […]
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Engineering Green DNA
Sustainability and green are two words often used interchangeably. In truth, one is a subset of the other. Sustainability is inclusive, an ethical umbrella that covers a gamut of social, economic, environmental, and business issues. But the idea of sustainment is integral to any green effort. Shippers often run into problems pushing environmental programs because […]
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How to Cut Seven Non-Traditional Wastes
In my first column for Inbound Logistics in 2012, I covered the seven traditional wastes identified in Lean thinking: Transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over-processing, and defects, more commonly known by the acronym TIM WOOD. But there are other wastes to consider in your supply chain and logistics functions. Let’s examine the following seven non-traditional […]
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It’s Time for an Automotive Aftermarket Logistics Tuneup
In automotive repair shops across the country, demand for older model parts is matching demand for newer model regular maintenance parts. This is because the average vehicle on the road today is 11.4 years old, and expected to reach 11.7 years by 2019. The result has transformed the aftermarket industry. Aftermarket SKUs are estimated in […]
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Ditch the Spreadsheet and Grow Your Business with Quality Data
To optimize logistics execution, shippers must gain visibility by adopting new technologies that provide high-quality data. But at many companies, separate freight procurement and logistics management functions leave managers struggling to optimize processes beyond freight rates, producing results that may have a large financial impact and damage customer satisfaction. Even today, many companies manage information […]
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