With supply chains globalized and interconnected now more than ever, the risk of disruption is higher than ever before. Any disruptions to material sourcing, labor, transportation, and consumption can have an immediate and devastating impact on a company’s supply chain. 

These disruptions can be caused by weather / natural disasters – hurricanes & tsunamis, conflict – civil unrest, terrorism, & warfare, economic issues – recession, policy changes – embargoes & tariffs, labor issues – strikes, and health issues – ebola.

Procurement executives are under more pressure than ever before to prove their value to stakeholders, and that’s not about to change any time soon.

With 2015 planning right around the corner, procurement leaders need to take a look at their processes and goals to determine how they can best showcase their value to their organization.

Expectations for procurement are changing rapidly and now is the time to stand up and take charge. In order to help with your planning, here is a list of what I predict will be the top five challenges for procurement to tackle this year.

When ProMat 2015 opens on March 23 it will include not only 800 exhibits from the industry’s leading solution providers, but also a comprehensive Educational Conference of over 100 sessions that focus on what’s next in best-in-class solutions for manufacturing and supply chain operations.

The ProMat Conference will include four keynotes, 100+ show floor seminars and a Workforce Summit. The Conference will cover leading trends, best practices and state-of-the-art equipment and technology solutions that can make manufacturing and the entire supply chain work more efficiently and profitably.

While drones are unlikely to become a part of our daily lives in the immediate future, they will soon begin taking on much larger roles for businesses and some individual consumers, from delivering groceries to revolutionizing private security, to changing the way farmers manage their crops — perhaps even aerial advertising.

 

We predict that 12% of an estimated $98 billion in cumulative global spending on aerial drones over the next decade will be for commercial purposes.

Supply-chain networks are the lifeblood of any electronics company: No components, no electronics products. So it makes sense for the relationships among all those involved to be efficient, streamlined, and collaborative.

Consumers are so overwhelmed by the volume of information in their lives that they ignore information before they need it, but expect immediate solutions when they need them. 

Dr. Kit Yarrow identifies this mentality as "IWWIWWIWI (I want what I want when it want it)" in her book, Decoding the New Consumer Mind. IWWIWWIWI demands unsurpassed levels of responsiveness by marketers. 

Meeting this level of customer service does not earn extra credit for retailers, but rather is a basic requirement for most shoppers in the current economy. Retailers who don’t accommodate these elevated expectations will find themselves uninvited to the purchase party in short order.

Amazon, the golden child in an industry full of retailers duking it out for single-digit comparable sales growth, raised eyebrows with its disappointing sales guidance for the holiday season. 

The online giant is in many ways facing a different environment than it did last Christmas, as bricks-and-mortar stores continue to evolve their Web capabilities and chip away at Amazon's price advantage. Along with stiffer competition, Amazon is also vulnerable to the hesitant consumer who, despite a slew of economic tailwinds, is still reluctant to spend.

A 5.6% increase in available van, refrigerated, and flatbed capacity was offset by a 5.6% decrease in available freight during the week ending Oct. 18, according to DAT Solutions, which operates the DAT network of load boards.

Nationally, truckload market rates fell slightly compared to the previous week. The average van and flatbed rates each fell 2 cents, to $2.01 per mile for vans and $2.38 per mile for flatbeds (all figures include fuel surcharge). The average reefer rate lost 1 cent to $2.28 per mile.

Facing an even bigger mountain of packages this holiday season, FedEx and UPS are hiring more workers to avoid the delays that frustrated shoppers and gift-recipients a year ago. Last December, the delivery giants were caught off-guard by bad weather and a surge in last-minute online shopping. An estimated 2 million packages were late at Christmas.

 

On Wednesday, FedEx Corp. said it expects deliveries between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve to rise 8.8 percent over last year, to 290 million shipments. Volume is expected to surge on each of the first three Mondays in December, with FedEx predicting a peak of 22.6 million shipments on Monday, Dec. 15.

A shortage of transportation equipment and possible labor disruptions at the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex, the nation's busiest, is delaying shipping containers for up to three weeks, threatening timely delivery to retailers for the holiday season.

The delays are affecting retailers including JC Penney Co, Macy's Inc, Kohl's Corp, Nordstrom Inc, American Eagle, Ralph Lauren and Carter's, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation.

There is no disputing that talent is a top challenge for companies worldwide. In PwC's 2014 CEO Survey, 93% of participants said they recognize the need to change their strategies for talent, but 61% acknowledged that they haven't yet taken the first step. The challenge is especially acute in supply chain operations, which is facing a talent shortage—despite an increasing number of undergraduate majors, MBA concentrations and entire programs in supply chain management.

The talent wars are not likely to end anytime soon. Various trends—including the widespread adoption of digital technologies, the increasing need to tailor operations for different customer segments, and a heightened focus on supply chain risk—will continue to raise the bar for supply chains and, by extension, the skills required to manage them.

The shift to online retailing over the last five years finally caught up to and overran U.S.-wide delivery capacity during last year's holiday season. According to Forrester Research, online retail sales will grow by an additional 60 percent over the next five years. 

This kind of sea change has stretched the ability of physical networks to keep up and the shortage of drivers had further exacerbated this situation. Instead, technology has become more important to meeting retailers' holiday delivery challenges by helping to improve the productivity of existing resources and offer a greater array of delivery services being demanded by consumers.

Can young professionals take a leadership role among more experienced co-workers? Absolutely! Leadership does not necessarily mean taking over. If you are a young professional, become an active part of a team and emerge as a natural leader. Here are a few ways to make sure you are taking steps to show competency, value and respect in the workplace.

Robot orders and shipments in North America set new records in the first nine months of 2014, according to the Robotic Industries Association (RIA), the industry’s trade group. 

A total of 21,235 robots valued at $1.2 billion were ordered from North American companies in the first nine months of 2014, an increase of 35% in units and 22% in dollars over the same period in 2013.

In the world of supply chains, signing on a new partner or trading partner has typically marked the beginning of a marathon. Whether by Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), EDIFACT, cXML, ebXML, value added networks, portals, or the rest of the alphabet soup of connectivity approaches, a great deal of time and effort is required to get trading partners’ systems aligned — even if trading hubs are involved. Every company has a different system, and different processes for getting things done. For a company with thousands of trading partners, imagine how much in resources it gobbles up just to manage and keep every partnership aligned.

With all the supply chain investments and process development that have been made over the years, it's high time to recognize companies who are doing a bang-up job on this front. Along those lines, Supply Chain Insights, a supply chain analyst and research company, recently announced its 15 "Supply Chains to Admire." Eight of them will be familiar to supply chain professionals in the industrial, high-tech, and automotive value networks: Apple, Audi, Cisco, EMC, Intel, Seagate, TSMC, and TRW.

The list of companies and the corresponding in-depth, cross-industry report are a result of 2.5 years of research aimed at analyzing and understanding which companies are operating at top performance levels and how they are still driving improvement.