On November 7th, one of the largest and deadliest storms ever recorded—super Typhoon Haiyan—made landfall in the Philippines. Relief efforts have only just begun in the wake of massive destruction and significant loss of life. While aid from the United States and other countries began to flow in on Monday, getting supplies into the affected areas is still a challenge, since roads are blocked by debris and airports are shut down.

The American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN) is supporting U.S. domestic logistics requests, including requests for transportation and warehouse space. We are working closely with the US arms of partner agencies to determine what resources are most needed. We will post those requests to our portal as soon as details become available. Right now, we anticipate a need for warehouse space near U.S. West Coast air and sea ports.

Manufacturing has an image problem," says Paul Gerbino, head of industrial-supply trade publishers ThomasNet News. "People think of it as dirty, dark, and low-paying." That stereotype is one reason why companies that make tangible products are struggling to find candidates for about 237,000 job openings. To put that figure in perspective, it's 89,000 more than the entire U.S. economy created in September.

The shortage isn't new -- demand for factory workers has been rising sharply every year since 2005 -- but it's poised to get a whole lot worse.

According to IDC's latest figures, IT spending on supply chain management software will surge from $3.9 billion in 2013 to $4.5 billion in 2015. Breaking down the numbers further, spending on demand sensing and planning applications will increase from $329 million to $390 million.

These estimates are spelled out in an IDC Manufacturing Insights report published in September that evaluates supply chain software vendors and their offerings. It's always nice to hear that manufacturers are gearing up to spend more on software that they feel can help supply chain managers do their jobs better. The question is how much better they can really do their jobs if other parts of the business are failing.

Last week, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced that it would be replacing some of its existing inventory with American-made products. 

The news was a made-for-TV event, of course, with U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker on hand for the announcement. And it’s undeniable that the company that made a name for itself selling super-cheap goods still has its fair share of cheap Chinese-made trinkets lining the shelves. 

But when you look beyond the political and PR theatrics of the Wal-Mart news, there is a glimmer of very real hope for American manufacturing. 

The results of a recent report titled "Supply Chain Resilience 2013" by Zurich Insurance Group make it clear that supply chain disruptions continue to have a significant impact on business performance and the problem is not being effectively managed.

According to the report, 75% of respondents still do not have full visibility of their supply chain and that 30% did not know where they fit into any of their suppliers’ priorities. Only 25% coordinate and report to gain an enterprise-wide view of disruption. In addition, 75% of respondents experienced at least one incident that caused disruption over the last year and 42% of disruptions originated below the tier one supplier.

Some 75 percent of organizations experienced supply chain disruption in the past year, according to a study. 

The research, conducted by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) and supported by CIPS and Zurich, revealed service failure by outsourcers are one of the top causes of supply chain disruption. 

Among the different kinds of cheating, the steepest rise this year was in vendor, supplier and procurement fraud, which jumped 7 percent, a study finds.

Propelled by a sharp rise in supply-chain misdeeds, the number of companies hit by fraud has risen by 9 percent in the past year, according to a new study. 

Passing the 2012 surface transportation bill was one thing. Implementing it is quite another. Two months before the legally-required Oct. 1, 2013 implementation deadline for Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), guidelines were still being developed that would be used to write the final implementing regulations. 

Add the government spending debates and government shutdown and the impending battle over the government spending ceiling and it is little wonder that the final rules are not yet final.

With RFID, return on investment derives from automated, accurate, real-time inventory tracking, says McLeod Williamson, RFID business development manager at Zebra Technologies. He provides an update on RFID applications in retail supply chains and describes how other industries are starting to leverage the technology.

"With any technology, ROI is all about the visibility you gain, and that is particularly true with RFID," says Williamson. "If you can see the product and identify where it slows down or is misdirected, then you can make better decisions. You can change your processes to achieve better efficiency and accuracy."

If politicians in Washington truly want to see a manufacturing renaissance in this country, they need to reform the regulatory system. Manufacturers understand the role regulations play in ensuring such important societal goals as health and safety. But the current process for promulgating rules is simply out of control. 

The Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation's research into the impact of federal regulations on manufacturers, prepared by NERA Economic Consulting, shows that since 1998 the cost of complying with manufacturing-related rules has grown far more rapidly than factory production: Manufacturing regulatory costs increased an average of 7.6% a year in that time span compared with average growth of 0.4% for manufacturing output. In other words, even when American manufacturing is in recession -- such as in 2007, when it contracted more than 20% compared with 5% for the overall economy -- federal regulatory costs keep mounting. For a country that depends on manufacturing to help expand the economy and create jobs, this is madness.

The supply chain is often viewed as a consumer of cash—at the supplier level, in transit, in production facilities and in warehouses. Companies continually wish to reduce the amount of inventory in their operations. 

The University of Tennessee's "Game-Changing Trends in Supply Chain" reveals that as much as 60% of companies' costs are in their supply chains. Opposing demands are those of customer satisfaction and business competitiveness, of which one mandate is having sufficient inventory on hand to meet customer demand for immediate shipments. 

The results of Modern’s 6th Annual Salary Survey paint an appealing picture of employment in materials handling, even as young, new talent continues to trickle into the industry. At $95,010, the average base salary is the highest in the six years of our survey, up nearly 6% over last year’s record average. Just as with last year, an impressive 97% of the more than 735 respondents expressed satisfaction with their work. 

Survey respondents represent a range of industries and disciplines, and 91% say they like their jobs. The same 91% said they would recommend the materials handling profession to others. With 55% indicating they intend to finish their careers with their current employer and with an average turnover rate of 6.7%, the industry seems to have little trouble retaining happy employees.

The London Gateway ‘super-port’ in Thurrock, Essex opened for business this week, welcoming its first shipping containers on Thursday.

The £1.5bn deep-sea port - which is Europe’s largest logistics park with 9.25 million sq ft of warehouse capacity, will house more than two million containers at maximum capacity - is the closest deep-sea port to London, Birmingham and Manchester.

Sharp swings in exchange rates. Swooning equity markets. Slowing growth. Investors in emerging markets over the past three decades have seen all these warning signs before. And when they flash in a number of economies simultaneously, the outcome often is not good.

So what should we make of the volatility that seems to be suddenly sweeping some of the world's most dynamic developing economies, including China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, Indonesia, and Mexico? For more than a decade, the economic success of these emerging markets has driven global growth and lifted millions of people out of poverty. Companies that built international businesses around such markets have found important new sources of growth and lowered their costs.

The biggest risks to the supply chain over the next 12 months was reported to be technology outages, burdensome regulations and failures by outsourcers, according to a new report by Zurich Insurance Group and the Business Continuity Institute (BCI).

Nearly 75 percent of respondents to the Zurich/BCI study reported at least one supply chain disruption during 2012, with 42percent of the disruptions occurring because of issues that occurred with their suppliers’ suppliers. Annual losses topped 1 million euros for 15 percent of the respondents, while 9 percent had losses of that magnitude in a single incident.