Articles

Commentary

IT Doesn’t Matter? Better Run That By Wal-Mart

In his May 2003 Harvard Business Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter,” Nicholas Carr famously claims that information technology, much like the railroad and the electricity grid before it, has become an infrastructure tool that doesn’t confer any strategic benefit. Carr’s main point is that because IT is ubiquitous and increasingly less costly than in previous […]

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Easing Your LTL Carrier’s Burden

Managing transportation costs is more important today than ever before. With the new Hours-of-Service rules, shippers will likely look to LTL carriers to play an increasing role in their supply chains, particularly handling a portion of their previously truckload multi-stop shipments. These volume shifts will likely lead to LTL capacity issues, and shippers may find […]

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Traveling the 3PL Continuum

Grab your Star Trek mug and take another look at this magazine’s cover. Then come back because I want to talk to you about parallel 3PL continuums. Yikes! Back? What did you see? Don’t worry, the cover is not a Rorschachian intrusion into your childhood. Rather it is meant to represent the continuing evolution—from infancy […]

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Achieving Success with AS/RS

Storage is one area of the supply chain that can provide increased efficiency, cost savings, and other benefits. In fact, automated storage/retrieval systems (AS/RS) can eliminate the need for physical inventory, according to Jurgen Conrad, CEO and president of Viastore Systems Inc., which develops and implements AS/RS and other automated material handling systems. “Correlating equipment […]

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Rethinking the Role of Public Incentives

When you consider changing a logistics center location, or expanding an existing logistics network, a myriad of crucial factors influence and shape the decisions your logistics team makes. Traditionally, the availability and applicability of local and state incentives is not a make-or-break factor in logistics placement decisions, but perhaps the time has come to elevate […]

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Not Your Father’s Airfreight Forwarder

“We’ve been using airfreight forwarders since the beginning of time,” says Andy Bordash, head of the logistics and operations team at Bayer Health Care. Many IL readers can say the same thing, but times have changed. As we report in The Plane Truth About Airfreight Forwarding, written by Leslie Hansen Harps, smart forwarders, both large […]

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Throw Off Your Chains, Take Up Nets

Driving business these days is the production of increased profit to the enterprise. Other drivers—globalization, outsourcing, customer satisfaction, RFID—pale in comparison to a positive profit picture. So, how can we look at the supply chain from a profit perspective? First, we must ask ourselves, where is the profit in the supply chain? This sounds like […]

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Someone is After Your Job…

And they want it to relocate it—no, not to Mumbai or China, but right here in the United States. Cities, states, and regions are increasingly competing to attract logistics and transportation jobs. Why? Because U.S. manufacturing jobs, and more recently, service sector jobs, continue to migrate to lower wage, lower tax, lower liability, lower regulation […]

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Prospective RFID Users Face Supply Chain Challenges

Although radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is not new to logistics or the supply chain, interest—and the need for interest in it—has skyrocketed. Alarms set off by the Department of Defense and Wal-Mart, among others, has many a supply chain manager in a tizzy. The DoD and Wal-Mart now mandate that all cases and pallets […]

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IT Does Matter

Arguably the most important development impacting transportation, except for the invention of the wheel, has been the application of information technology. Yes, I know, the nationwide rail network, the excellent interstate highway system, the containerization concept, the Panama Canal … But the reason I think logistics IT is preeminently important is because it impacts everyone […]

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