MHI Newswire

MHI Blog -- Many were skeptical when online retail giant Amazon announced it was looking into the possibility of delivering goods to private households by drone, but in July 2014, the company’s Prime Air initiative petitioned the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for permission to test "small unmanned aircraft systems" in the U.S., stating that "one day, seeing Amazon Prime Air will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today, resulting in enormous benefits for consumers across the nation."

Since then, Google has launched a drone initiative called Project Wing and, in October 2015, Walmart applied to the FAA for permission to test the use of drones to take stock of trailers at its warehouses and—potentially—to deliver goods directly to customers at the company’s facilities or in their homes. Drones clearly won’t be the answer to every freight transport need, but they do exemplify the idea that when it comes to innovation in transportation systems, the sky’s quite literally the limit.

The New York Times -- Frank Carollo, a longtime member of the City Council here, had worked for several weeks fine-tuning a proposal to limit the use of recreational drones, the increasingly popular remote-controlled flying devices. Minutes before the start of the vote on the rules this month, lawyers from the Federal Aviation Administration called him.

The lawyers said the Miami ordinance needed to make clear that the federal agency had ultimate control over airspace. Not wanting to delay the vote, Mr. Carollo complied, deleting requirements about permitting that would have duplicated those by the F.A.A., before getting the new law approved unanimously by the City Council.

Industry Week -- While there has been much talk over the past 10 years or so about "collaboration," much of it has been focused on external supply chain collaboration. It seems that many companies neglected to get their own houses in order before looking outside their own supply chains, according to a University of Tennessee report entitled, "Bending the Chain: The Surprising Challenge of Integrating Purchasing and Logistics."

The report states that "organizations that closely integrate their purchasing and logistics functions deliver better business results... [but] many firms fail to capitalize on this opportunity and have supply chains where purchasing and logistics operate in ‘silos’ with little cohesion." 

Fast Company -- Despite widespread criticism, FedEx appears to have had better on-time performance this holiday season than in either of the past two years, according to delivery tracking firm ShipMatrix.

The carrier had come under fire  for breaking delivery guarantees, particularly after bad weather swept much of the South last week, including around FedEx's Memphis hub.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive -- Over the past year, companies such as Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, P&G and Mars publicly committed to implementing zero deforestation policies throughout their supply chains. Sustainability is evolving from a nice-to-have to a business imperative, and businesses are beginning to recognize that what is good for the environment can also be good for revenues and help drive business growth.  

When done right and systematically, sustainability and zero-deforestation policies lead to improved brand image, industry differentiation, brand loyalty and, ultimately, stronger relationships with customers. For consumers, in particular, a company’s environmental practices are often defined by its supply chain, which provides a clear picture into how materials are produced and sourced.

Material Handling & Logistics -- Sputtering global economies continued to weigh on U.S. manufacturing, as the sector showed continued weakness in December, the Institute for Supply Management reported. ISM's monthly purchasing manager's index registered 48.2, down 0.4% from November's 48.6.

Along with the effects of the global economic softness, noted Neil Shankar of TD Economics, U.S. manufacturing "continues to contend with the protracted slump in energy prices which is weighing on energy related investment and hindering demand for drilling equipment and other heavy machinery." And he added that the sector" is not getting any help from the U.S. dollar which continues to rally making U.S. made products more expensive in foreign markets."

MHI Blog -- MHI view just released a new video on urban logistics and distribution.

In the video, David Johnston, senior vice president of manufacturing & distribution at JDA Software, shares how retailers can meet the new speed requirements through altering their storefront strategy and by using driverless technologies. 

MHI view content is designed to spark supply chain innovation by sharing useful information about the industry’s maturing, growing, and emerging technologies that were identified in the 2015 MHI Annual Industry Report.

eCommerce Bytes -- UPS is calling Wednesday "National Returns Day," while in the UK, Royal Mail is calling today "Mail-Back Monday."

Shipping carriers can barely catch their breath from a busy holiday shipping season when they're inundated once again with some of the very packages they delivered to holiday shoppers. Welcome to Returns Week.

Modern Materials Handling -- According to occupational data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), manufacturing and transportation/distribution/logistics (M&L) make up approximately 13% of the U.S. labor force and 20.5% of U.S. GDP. However, according to recent studies, both industries are experiencing a skills gap in their labor forces, and that gap is expected to grow over the next 10 to 15 years.

A 2015 report by The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte finds that by 2025 there will be nearly 3.5 million manufacturing jobs to be filled, but the skills gap is expected to result in 2 million of those jobs going unfilled. MHI reports that the supply chain industry will need to fill about 1.4 million new jobs between 2014 and 2018 – roughly 270,000 new jobs a year.

EBN -- The college graduates of 2015 were the most indebted ever – until the next round of grads wave their diplomas in the spring. But is sinking deep into debt really the ticket to a great career? If you have the means (and brains) to invest in an Ivy League degree, all stats seem to indicate you get ample payback for the $200,000 plus expense.

But among those high school grads who may not qualify for generous financial aid packages and at the same time cannot afford – or even want – an Ivy League degree, there are still lucrative options, especially if they study science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

Fortune -- In the blistering heat one recent afternoon, a crowd of people gathered down a narrow side street in Govandi, one of Asia’s poorest and most sprawling slums, on the eastern edge of Mumbai. But on this particular day, the crowd of men jammed into a storefront in the side street had arrived to try their hand at something entirely new in their lives: online shopping. At the door, a man handed passersby leaflets explaining that the store owner’s laptop connected to hundreds of thousands of items that could be delivered to his establishment within a few days. "I bought a mobile phone," says Ansari Jameel, 24, amazed at the swift transaction, as he emerged from the store, adding that he had scraped together the money from his job packing vegetables in a local street market. "The prices are good, and I find a lot of things I cannot find other places, like clothes, shoes, and watches."

Jameel does not know it, but he has just become part of a crucial experiment for one of the giants of the tech world: Amazon.com ( AMZN -0.91% )  . His surprise discovery of Internet commerce is like found treasure to Amazon—and in CEO Jeff Bezos’s estimation, a key part of his strategy for future growth.

Chainlink Research -- Today, Omni-channel is so much broader than just the technology platform the customer uses for purchases—web, store, mobile, catalogue and so on. At its heart it is really about fulfillment—the customer’s choice of fulfillment.

Omni is complex and the drive to adopt it is a difficult and expensive road for those retailers who didn’t think through the complexity of the processes and data a long, long time ago. In addition, organizations that have had a lot of change such as mergers and acquisitions (and have multiple systems that just don’t talk to each other) have variable capability to identify ‘the customer,’ as well as difficulty seeing across their operations to complete transactions.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive -- 2015 saw countless hurricanes, disasters and delays. 2016 is set to be just as, if not more, hectic. Take some time now to think about where your supply chain could have improved over 2015—did you react too slowly to an event? Did you miss the word on a closed factory? If you could go back and change a few things, what would they be? What tools do you wish you had to help you through tough times? What operational lessons can you draw from last year?

We asked ourselves the same questions and came up with some ideas to get you started—how can you refresh your supply chain to improve efficiency and cut costs?

Material Handling & Logistics -- In Asia-Pacific trade as a percentage of GDP has increased from 38% in 2000 to 47% in 2015, and is expected to remain steady at 50% through to 2030. As logistic hubs are "centerpieces for trading functions," CBRE recently released a report, "Asia Pacific Logistic Hubs, 2015," analyzing emerging hubs in Asia Pacific.

The regions were chosen based on factors which included the shift in low-end manufacturing; rising consumption power and infrastructure and policy developments.