MHI Blog -- MODEX has been named to the 2014 Trade Show News Network’s (TSNN) U.S. Top 250 Trade Shows list. TSNN’s list represents the top 250 trade shows held last year in the U.S. ranked by net square footage. MODEX 2014 was ranked 102 among the top 250 trade shows.

TSNN is an online resource and authority for the trade show, exhibition and event industry. The organization operates an event database that includes more than 19,500 trade shows, exhibitions, public events and conferences.

Modern Materials Handling -- Manufacturing and supply chain professionals gathered in record numbers in Chicago last month for ProMat 2015, the largest material handling and logistics trade expo in North America. With registrations topping 37,091 attendees, show producer MHI announced a 8.8 percent attendance jump over 2013.

The four-day event, March 23-26, covered 340,000 net square feet of exhibit space in Chicago’s McCormick Place with 802 exhibiting companies. The ProMat expo was once again collocated with Automate 2015.

Industrial Distribution -- For many manufacturers and distributors, a seamless supply chain of highly efficient and tightly integrated business processes sharing a single unified source of accurate real-time data seems an unachievable goal. That’s not surprising since such organizations are struggling to gain control over their entire supply chain using a mix of disparate systems that fail to fully mesh with one another creating silos of outdated and unreliable information. Instead of enabling manufacturers and distributors, a mixture of poorly connected systems actually work against organizations to create bottlenecks in the free flow of information resulting in order delays, picking and packaging errors, and dissatisfied customers and partners.

EBN -- Every year, in the United States alone, cargo theft is rampant and increasingly more sophisticated. To cope, electronics supply chains have to increase visibility to combat loss.

The FreightWatch International Supply Chain Intelligence Center (FWI SCIC) documented 794 cargo thefts throughout the US in 2014, each averaging $232,924, the group reported in its 2014 US Annual Cargo Theft Report released in March. "Although the total number of verified reported incidents decreased by 12%, the threat of cargo theft continues to grow in the United States due to increased organization and innovation on the part of cargo thieves," the report said.

Environmental Leader -- Improving efficiency and sustainability across the supply chain is a hot topic — one example of this is AkzoNobel’s announcement that it will measure and report on the four dimensions of capital, financial, natural, social and human, across its entire value chain — but what does delivering sustainability across supply chains look like?

In a Supply Management blog, Action Sustainability director Shaun McCarthy says it takes five ingredients to make the "whole enchilada" of supply chain sustainability.

Material Handling & Logistics -- In the United States, 41% of manufacturing respondents indicated they are accessing IT resources via the public cloud, according to the IDC Global Technology and Industry Research Organization IT Survey, 2014.

One reason for the overwhelming acceptance is that for manufacturers the advantages are significant since line of business leaders and their IT organizations increasingly rely on cloud to flexibly, the survey says.

MHI Blog -- DHL and Cisco jointly released a new Trend Report focused on the Internet of Things (IoT). According to the report, IoT will generate $8 trillion worldwide in Value at Stake over the next decade.

This will come from five primary drivers: innovation and revenue ($2.1 trillion); asset utilization ($2.1 trillion); supply chain and logistics S$1.9 trillion); employee productivity improvements ($1.2 trillion); and enhanced customer and citizen experience ($700 billion).

Manufacturing Business Technology -- No matter the time of year, social media always has the potential to dramatically change demand for particular items within minutes or hours. Whether that’s a big rise in demand for crop tops seen in street style round ups during Fashion Week, or for a sleek new tablet featured on the Winter finale of this year’s hot new TV show, platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are really driving the way products are introduced and consumed.

In today’s business environment, change operates on a scale and at a pace that is unprecedented, making it difficult to plan for today, let alone the future. Capturing the vagaries of demand once they occur is a challenge but an even greater challenge is planning and forecasting for an unpredictable and variable market.

Supply Chain Shaman -- Yesterday, I presented to 700 global attendees on an APICS webinar. In the presentation, I shared data on the evolution of supply chain planning and the results on user satisfaction. The results confound me. They are not consistent with market perception. Let me share the story.

Supply Chain Brain -- Liner shipping service reliability across the three core East-West trades hit a five-month peak in March with an aggregate on-time performance of 64 percent, according to Carrier Performance Insight, the online schedule reliability tool provided by Drewry Supply Chain Advisors.

The latest result represents an 8.5 percentage point gain over February and is the second-best average (after October 2014) since the start of the new data series in May 2014.

MHI Blog -- Rapid economic growth in emerging economies, labor disruptions, political instability and a disease outbreak in West Africa led to a rise in business losses in 2014 according to the latest Global Supply Chain Intelligence report. Globally over $23 billion was lost to cargo theft in 2014 from a variety of supply chain threats, while the four most economically damaging natural disasters caused a collective $32.8 billion of damage. Within Europe, trade interruption due to an array of strikes throughout Europe caused $1.5 billion of direct losses to business.

eMarketer -- Mobile is still for upper-funnel shopping activities, and research released last month by comScore illustrates mobile’s sliver of the overall digital retail dollar pie.

According to the study, smartphones and tablets accounted for 60% of time spent engaging with digital retail content in Q4 2014, vs. 40% for desktop. However, there was a 47% monetization gap between the two, with desktop taking 87% of digital retail dollars, leaving mobile to account for just 13% of the total $82.8 billion US retail ecommerce sales in the final quarter of last year.

The Motley Fool -- Investors in FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX ) and United Parcel Service (NYSE: UPS ) have probably noticed some significant changes in their company's end markets in the last few years. Burgeoning e-commerce demand, changes in global trade patterns, and transforming parcel delivery preferences have adjusted the environment in which transportation companies operate. How have they changed the operations of FedEx and UPS, and what does it mean for investors?

Supply & Demand Chain Executive -- The British supply chain sector is in the midst of a skills shortage and, if it is to correct the issue, the industry must be prepared to break with convention and think outside the box when it comes to recruitment.

Traditionally, the recruitment process is treated as a checkbox exercise. Employers compile a set of standardized criteria for a specific role, and they attempt to match up a potential candidate based on the skills and experience which best match this.

Material Handling & Logistics -- Earlier this month it was leaked that the ports of Seattle and Tacoma are discussing merging to try to create efficiencies to combat the growing ports of Vancouver (Canada) and those in California. This comes right after nine long months of dispute that finally ended with West Coast port employers and union members reaching a tentative five-year agreement on a new contract. The two sides were praised for their compromise, and the ports were slated to resume full operations the following day. However, the need for increased efficiency and throughput—both in times of calm and times of disruption—is still very much there.

Refrigerated & Frozen Food -- Capacity is a word that’s constantly on the minds of many companies. Is there enough capacity available to handle my freight? When will capacity become tight? What strategies can we implement to prepare for and actively cope with a capacity shortage?

From 2004-2008, shippers experienced a significant capacity crunch, and in 2009-2012, the economic downturn drove many trucking companies out of business, leaving behind a shortage of over-the-road (OTR) truck drivers. The market has since partially bounced back, with 2014 being a profitable year for trucking. However, it was expected that overall trucking rates would go down as oil and fuel prices decreased, but that hasn’t been the case, particularly in the refrigerated trucking sector.