Archive for February, 2009
“Buy American” and Global Trade Myths
· CommentsI’ve received several emails on my “A ‘Buy American’ Supply Chain” posting from last week, and a couple of people have commented on the website. It’s certainly a topic that’s stirring a lot of conversation, particularly around the two key questions that I raised in my posting: Are “trade wars” on the horizon, and if so, what impact will they have on your supply chains? Will more companies adopt… Continue reading
Last month, I wrote about how the Port of Long Beach decided to move ahead with its “Clean Trucks Fee,” which went into effect February 18. According to the press release, the fee is expected to raise “about $1 million a day or about $1 billion over the next few years at both San Pedro Bay ports to help finance the replacement of many of the 17,000 trucks… Continue reading
An App Store for Logistics Software
· CommentsTired of using the pencil and notepad approach, my wife downloaded a grocery list app from the Apple App Store for her iTouch. I’m not sure she’s used it yet, and I have my doubts that it’ll make her shopping experience any easier, but it got me thinking: what if there was an app store for logistics software, where a transportation manager, for example, could browse through various applications… Continue reading
The Dow Jones industrial average was down more than 250 points yesterday, closing at its lowest point since May 7, 1997. Going back in time may be cool and exciting in the movies, but this type of time travel gives me motion sickness. And to make matters worse, some folks are saying the worst is yet to come.
Speaking of time travel, next month will mark my ten year… Continue reading
This morning I attended an analyst phone briefing hosted by IBM on their Global Chief Supply Chain Officer study (an executive summary of “The Smarter Supply Chain of the Future” will be available for download tomorrow at this link). The presentation highlighted some of the key findings from the study, based on a survey of 400 global supply chain executives. The presentation contained a lot of interesting information (too… Continue reading
Last month, HighJump issued a press release that really caught my eye. It wasn’t so much the headline (“HighJump Software Offers Promotion Including Complementary ROI Assessment for Its Labor Management System”), but a sentence buried deep in the press release: “This special offer for HighJump Labor Advantage allows companies with constrained capital budgets to realize the benefits of a labor management system before paying for the license
A Google Approach to Supply Chain Management
· CommentsI read a thought-provoking article in BusinessWeek last week by Jeff Jarvis (author of “What Would Google Do?”) that asked the following question: If Google ran a car company, what would it look like? You can read the article for Jeff’s ideas, but in a nutshell, he thinks The Big Three (can we still call them big?) need to transform their product design process, from a closed and… Continue reading
Video game visualization technology has come to the Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) market. These new products and modules are not merely “slick” packages that are “nice to have” additions to a WMS solution. Whenever a software solution’s usability improves, new forms of productivity are enabled. The personal computer revolution, after all, was based as much on improved user interfaces as it was on increased computing power. These new video game-like… Continue reading
