We are heading into what I can only call one of the single greatest days of the year in Boston: Patriots’ Day. The holiday officially commemorates the “shot heard round the world,” or the first shots fired at the battles of Lexington and Concord and the beginning of the American Revolutionary War. The region marks […]
As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I spent the first week of February in Orlando attending ARC Advisory Group’s Industry Forum. The event had a heavy focus on how digitizing factories, cities, and infrastructure will benefit technology end users and suppliers alike. While I was there, I had the opportunity to sit down […]
Sustainability and the concept of “going green” has been a hot topic lately, especially as companies and countries look at their overall carbon footprint and look for ways to be more environmentally friendly. Of course, there is a system of checks and balances for global corporations, as even though they may have the best intentions, […]
Logistics Viewpoints has assembled the following list of conferences that my ARC supply chain colleagues and I consider to be the premier industry conferences scheduled for 2019. The include logistics industry association events and supply chain software conferences.
ARC Advisory Group 2019 supply chain trends of the year include: Global Trade and Tariffs; Logistics Labor Shortages and Automation; The “Digital Supply Chain” as the Logistics Technology Concept of the Year; expansion of Machine Learning and AI Enhancements. With taxes and duties accounting for a substantial portion of cost of goods sold, it is likely that companies will be reevaluating the impact on their global supply chains. Meanwhile, the “digital supply chain” is a conceptual umbrella term that will continue to be used to identify supply chain software, communications, and automation efforts that meet certain digital criteria.
We have entered the final weeks of the Logistics Viewpoints year. As always, it was a busy year covering the latest supply chain and logistics trends, emerging technologies, mergers and acquisitions, major news announcements, and more. Like in years past, we wanted to look back at the Top 10 most popular articles written this year […]
Collaborative autonomous robotics (cobots) in the warehouse have progressed considerably over the last few years. They have now proven their ability to significantly increase warehouse worker productivity by a factor of 2x-plus. The next hurdle is return on investment (ROI), which factors costs and time-to-value in with productivity improvements and other financial benefits. Port Logistics Group’s (PLG) analysis of its current Locus Robotics implementation project provides insights into the factors that make such a solution superior to other investment alternatives.
Amazon is not the world’s least sustainable company. On the contrary, I believe Amazon is a leader in transforming our economy toward green business models. Amazon is an enormous business. In 2017, the company generated $177 billion in revenues. Shipping costs, including sortation and delivery center and transportation costs, were $21.7 billion. In some ways the transportation of e-commerce orders generates more GHG than traditional store replenishment. But this does not consider the trips consumers make to and from stores in their own vehicles. I believe comparing supply chains to final destination in this way levels the field with respect to e-commerce vs. traditional brick and mortar.
The on-demand supply chain market is experiencing significant interest and growth right now. Within the on-demand supply chain, I am specifically talking about the transportation and warehousing segments, where investment money is pouring in to digital freight matching apps, crowdsourced last miles deliveries, and on-demand warehousing. While these businesses are still in the early stages […]
ARC Advisory Group released its updated Warehouse Automation & Control (WAC) market study last week. This research is an evaluation of the market with detailed analysis of the 2017 base year and a five-year forecast through 2022. I would like to take this opportunity to communicate some of the prominent themes I observed during the research […]