MHI Newswire

It’s no secret that, in today’s global business environment, superior supply chain performance is essential to competitive advantage. According to research by PwC’s Performance Measurement Group (PMG), there’s a strong correlation between superior supply chain and superior financial performance. Specifically, companies with top-flight supply chains can realize 50% higher annual sales growth and 20% higher profitability than their competitors. That makes sense, given the supply chain’s role in driving breakthrough innovation, customer satisfaction and operational efficiencies.

When someone mentions the Internet of Things (IoT), most people think of electronics or wearables – the types of technologies that are driving adoption of a highly personalized "smart" consumer lifestyle. But there’s much more to the IoT story, and more specifically, its impact on the supply chain.

 

Gartner recently released a write-up highlighting what many supply chain professionals have been weighing for some time – the IoT trend is going to impact businesses, too, and in particular, it will disrupt the way we think about logistics. In the piece, Gartner says a thirty-fold increase in internet-connected physical devices by the year 2020 will "significantly alter how the supply chain operates." Specifically, it notes the impact will relate to how supply chain leaders access information, among other things.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today awarded 19 advanced manufacturing technology planning grants totaling $9 million to new or existing industry-driven consortia to develop technology roadmaps aimed at strengthening U.S. manufacturing and innovation performance across industries.

 

The grants, awarded to universities and other nonprofit organizations, are the first conferred by NIST's new Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia (AMTech) Program. They range from $378,900 to $540,000 for a period of up to two years.

Data released by Panjiva, an online search engine with detailed information on global suppliers and manufacturers, showed an improvement in global trade activity from February to March after a lackluster February.

U.S.-bound waterborne shipments in March—at 1,066,961—was up 20 percent annually and up 8 percent from February to March. This sequential change was well ahead of a 15 percent February to March decline in 2013 and in line with a 14 percent gain for the same period in 2012.

Amazon is expanding its Sunday package delivery service to 15 more cities across the country, including Philadelphia, New Orleans and Dallas.

Amazon first rolled out the service as part of a new deal with the U.S. Postal Service in November to New York and Los Angeles, just ahead of the holiday rush. At the time, it said it planned to extend it to other cities this year.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) present an incomparable number of options for the design of the new organization’s supply chain, so it’s not altogether surprising that so many of these projects fail to meet executive and shareholder expectations. Depending on which report you consult, M&A initiatives have a failure rate of anywhere between 50 and 85 percent!

 

Supply chain design technology enables companies to model their supply chains, evaluate alternatives, optimize the network structure and simulate multiple scenarios in order to predict the resulting operational performance of the merged organizations. 

Procurement professionals should not be afraid of not having a long-term strategy, the head buyer at Hitachi Rail Europe (HRE) told an event yesterday.

Jamie Foster, procurement director at HRE, was appointed with the task of growing a purchasing department after the firm won a massive contract in 2012 to replace UK intercity trains.

While negotiators prepare for talks on a new contract for West Coast dockworkers, import volume at the nation’s major retail container ports will increase 3.5 percent in May, according to the monthly Global Port Tracker report released by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates.

"We’re expecting a lot of cargo to move through the ports this summer and we want to make sure there aren’t any supply chain disruptions that would impact the cargo flow," NRF Vice President for Supply Chain and Customs Policy Jonathan Gold said. "We hope there won’t be any issues, but the sooner labor and management can agree on a new contract, the better it will be for everyone who relies on the West Coast ports."

Often, OEMs are left to worry about the problem of counterfeit semiconductors. Really, though, the semiconductor industry should be following some crucial guidelines to ensure the integrity of devices in the supply chain.

The danger of counterfeit or substandard semiconductor devices getting into a supply chain, especially when due to EOL events, is nothing new. However, OEMs still do not have an easy way to ensure that devices purchased from unauthorized sources are genuine, or that the components have been properly stored and handled. 

Relationships happen faster when there is more carrot than a stick. Over the last decade, scorecards have become more of a stick than a carrot.

You may not have known that shipping containers can dance.

 

To promote GE Transportation, agency The Barbarian Group teamed up with Reuben Wu of British electronic band Ladytron to create a song and video featuring the company's intermodal products—which help choreograph millions of containers of freight being carried by railroads, trucks and boats—at work at the CSX Intermodal Terminal in North Baltimore, Ohio. Wu recorded some of the sounds in the song at the terminal itself, a trick we've already seen applied to athletes by brands like Gillette and Coca-Cola. The GE video, part of its "Brilliant Machines" campaign, though, is basically industrial-grade technophilia, struggling to make freight logistics anything but incredibly boring. At its heart, the idea is a little silly, but the result itself actually ends up being pretty hypnotizing.

Most firms have already invested in business intelligence, supply chain management (SCM), and modeling tools that claim to make it possible to drill deeper into their supply chain data in search of savings. These tools are often marketed with vague promises that they will harness the organization's 'big data' and/or provide 'end-to-end' visibility.

mport volume at the nation’s major retail container ports is expected to increase 3.5 percent in May as negotiators prepare to begin talks on a new contract for West Coast dockworkers, according to the monthly Global Port Tracker report by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates.

"We’re expecting a lot of cargo to move through the ports this summer and we want to make sure there aren’t any supply chain disruptions that would impact the cargo flow," NRF Vice President for Supply Chain and Customs Policy Jonathan Gold said. "We hope there won’t be any issues, but the sooner labor and management can agree on a new contract, the better it will be for everyone who relies on the West Coast ports."

The biggest barrier to the success of a company’s sustainable supply chain practices is a lack of leadership support, according to a PwC and APICS Foundation survey.

 

About 30 percent of operations executives surveyed said their company has a documented supply chain sustainability strategy, but only 17 percent of managers and below agreed. As a result, mid-level management is not able to take the steps needed to drive meaningful change in the supply chain, according to Sustainable Supply Chains: Making Value the Priority.

Most of the products consumers believe to be "Made in China" actually contain more U.S.-made parts or other content than they or policymakers realize, according to a new report prepared for the National Retail Federation.

"This report looks at retailers’ worldwide sourcing of merchandise not just as a global supply chain but as a global value chain," NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said. "It shows the value added at each step along the way, not just in manufacturing but from the initial concept to the finished product. Even in a product that says ‘Made in China,’ much of what goes into that product is ‘Made in America.’ That means millions of American jobs for American workers regardless of what the label might say."

According to a new survey of 600 executives from Deloitte — "The Ripple Effect: How Manufacturing and Retail Executives View the Growing Challenge of Supply Chain Risk" — global executives are increasingly concerned about the growing risks to their supply chains and costly negative impacts such as margin erosion and inability to keep up with demand. 

As they operate in this environment of escalating risk, an alarming 45 percent of surveyed executives say their supply chain risk management programs are only somewhat effective or not effective at all.