Articles
Big Data
Artificial Intelligence Will Transform the Global Logistics Network in Three Key Areas
Two of the world’s most influential research and advisory firms predict major acceleration in artificial intelligence (AI) use as more businesses look to make the digital transformation leap. Forrester projects AI investment tripled in 2017, and Gartner expects AI to be pervasive in almost every new software product and service by 2020. With its cognitive […]
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Using KPIs to Optimize Transportation Data
Data drives sound business decisions. The same principle applies to decisions surrounding transportation issues. Specifically for parcel, the best data source is carrier invoices, supplemented by the manifest (TMS) data where possible. Your carriers should make invoice data easily available, especially if you use a third-party vendor to review and pay your invoices. They should […]
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Is Supply Chain Planning Right for the Cloud?
The explosive growth of data that today’s supply chain teams must manage creates challenges even for the most seasoned professionals. Manufacturers, retailers, and distributors need agile systems that help manage and simplify complexity. However, one of the biggest hurdles today’s organizations face is gaining executive approval to implement an advanced supply chain planning system. Is […]
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Manufacturers Take to Technology, Automation
Driven by globalization, intensifying competition, and rising customer demand for more options and higher quality products, a connected plant floor has become a necessity. As a result, manufacturers are adopting the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to enhance visibility and improve quality, with the number of organizations achieving a fully connected factory expected to rise […]
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Artificial Intelligence to Their Advantage
Artificial intelligence (AI) now touches almost every industry and walk of life. Driverless cars are chauffeuring themselves through Pittsburgh’s roads, robots dominate the activity within Amazon’s warehouses, and increasingly sophisticated algorithms for demand planning and design have gone digital. Personalization and machine learning continue to improve customers’ experiences and open countless doors for the tech […]
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Consumer Behavior: The Missing Link
In today’s highly competitive, omni-channel market, companies are realizing the path to success hinges on their ability to understand consumer behavior. Retailers and manufacturers can unlock significant competitive advantage by leveraging consumer insights to make category decisions and create localized merchandising assortments. Most companies lack the ability to mine and leverage important customer data, and […]
Read MoreDigital Change: Realizing the Potential
Digital Transformation (DT) is coming of age. Eighty percent of respondents to a recent IFS Digital Change Survey see themselves as “enabled”, “enhanced” or “optimized” to leverage DT. More impressively, 89 percent say they have “advantageous” or “adequate” funding in place for digital projects—a clear acknowledgment that the time of disruptive technologies is here, and […]
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It Happens Automagically
I heard the phrase “it happens automagically” not long ago, and it reminded me of an editorial I wrote in 2000, when I mused that one day we’d have “a global internet without wires, melded with interaction free detection—finding something without looking.” Today, it is real and it happened sooner than I expected. The Internet […]
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The Key to Lasting Supply Chain Innovation: Get Real
Managing a business for sustained growth often means finding and implementing innovative solutions to the challenges of complex supply chain logistics. Yet, when it comes to achieving lasting, repeatable innovation, it’s the real-world solutions that win out time and time again in leading logistics facilities. In his book Moneyball, Michael Lewis detailed how an analytical, […]
Read MorePutting an End to Black Box Shipping
Sometimes, for even the most critical shipments, the only two data points that the shipper receives is when the shipment left their hands and confirmation from the destination that the shipment has arrived. This can be likened to a black box in computer science, where a function is considered a black box when the developer […]
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