I am getting questions from friends and acquaintances about whether the US’s supply chain woes are over. Afterall, port congestion has cleared, transportation costs have gone down, we are seeing far fewer product shortages, and the looming recession will likely take some of the pressure off hiring and retention woes. The people I talk to […]
What almost cost $2B a day and more than 700,000 jobs in the US alone, but would have led to global reverberations? The rail industry was on the brink of a strike-induced labor shortage that would have happened overnight if the President hadn’t intervened. This averted disruption is just one recent example of the impact […]
Artificial intelligence has been applied to just about every supply chain application imaginable, including transportation management and execution, demand planning, supply chain planning, warehouse management, and order management. It has also been embedded in autonomous trucks, robots, and drones for navigation. There are myriad applications outside of the supply chain world as well. A few […]
School is out for the summer and kids are playing outside. Part of that could be due to a shortage in video game consoles. Nintendo is struggling to break out of a frustrating sales slowdown, selling 33 percent fewer units of Switch game systems in the April-June quarter than a year ago in Japan due […]
When Russia invaded Ukraine, I knew there would be impacts on global supply chains. But supply chain impacts like the rising cost of gas, or the inability of a train to cross Siberia to bring goods from China to Europe, or the increased congestion this would cause at China ports, was not the supply chain […]
For the last decade or so, my wife and I have had a running joke about how she loves the Foo Fighters but doesn’t know any of their songs. The truth is, there are a lot songs that, when she hears them, she always asks “who sings this?” In the end, it is the Foo […]
Welcome back! And while a new year has donned, the same supply chain issues and trends continue to unfold as we enter 2022. One of the biggest trends and areas of interest is around autonomous vehicles (see the TuSimple news below). The technology that is driving autonomous vehicles continues to improve, and as my colleague […]
Black Friday is in the books, and unsurprisingly, it was a big one. According to the annual survey by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Prosper Insights & Analytics, nearly 180 million Americans shopped during the five-day holiday shopping period from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday. This exceeded initial estimates by more than 21 million […]
Last Wednesday, November the 3rd, the Conference Board, put out their forecast for global economic growth. World growth for 2022 is forecast to grow at 3.9%; growth across all mature economies is forecast to be up by 3.9%; and the US and China are forecast to grow at 3.8% and 5.5% respectively. The Conference Board […]
A few week ago, I wrote an article about the transformative nature of the plant-based meat supply chain. Over the last few years, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have been creating meat substitutes that promise to eat “more like meat.” Fast food chains around the country have been introducing meatless burgers, and now Burger King […]
