All Features
William A. Levinson
Ryan Day1 describes how the rise of independent auto dealers is a “gray swan” event for the automobile industry. This was not only bound to happen, as observed by the author, but also long overdue. The article states, “...current state laws prohibit OEMs from selling new vehicles directly to…
Anthony Tarantino
In 2007, Nassim Taleb described black swans as highly improbable events that had dramatic or even catastrophic effects on markets and economies. Until recently, it seemed that such events were indeed rare.1 There’s now a major rethinking with the world entering the third year of the Covid-19…
Jonathan Gilpin
The world of procurement is often tricky. It involves choosing one appropriate candidate, ultimately benefiting them while rejecting and disadvantaging others.
That said, it isn’t just the businesses picked that will profit from winning the contracts; it’s also their supply chain, their local…
Tinglong Dai
Francis Fukuyama, the U.S. political scientist who once described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “end of history,” suggested that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might be called “the end of the end of history.” He meant that Vladimir Putin’s aggression signals a rollback of the ideals of a…
Georgia Tech News Center
With the United States’ semiconductor chip shortage likely to continue well into 2022, a Georgia Tech expert predicts that the U.S. will need to make major changes to the manufacturing and supply chain of these all-important chips to stave off further effects, including making more of them here at…
Jonathan Gilpin
The sheer scope of public-sector organizations’ requirements means many rely on the global supply chain. This involves buyers across the world procuring both goods and services from suppliers in destinations throughout the world. A global supply chain has benefits, many associated with price, but…
Kenny Tsang
The e-commerce industry is forecast to see substantial growth in 2022. Retail e-commerce sales in 2021 totaled $4.9 trillion, and may reach $5.42 trillion this year. Exponential growth in the sector has given rise to an ecosystem of millions of third-party sellers on sites such as Amazon that make…
Gary Steinberg
Disruptions in the global supply chain have led to a new dynamic for many small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs)—the need to be more strategic about “second sourcing” and reshoring. The biggest increase is in what’s referred to as second sourcing, which adds redundancies such as a second…
V R Vijay Anand
As the world moves toward a new, post-pandemic normal, industries must leverage digital transformation at an accelerated pace. This is already happening. According to IBM, 67 percent of manufacturers have accelerated digital projects since Covid-19.
Although improved operational efficiency is…
Sébastien Breteau
Although previous industrial revolutions were driven by steam machines and the dawn of electricity, the unfolding fourth industrial revolution is being powered by digital technologies, such as cloud computing, machine learning, and the internet of things. Accompanying the fourth industrial…
Jonathan Gilpin
The Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply, a United Kingdom-based global professional body working for the purchasing and supply professions, suggests that every supply chain should enhance its diversity because this “can not only bring new ideas and solutions to an organization, but also…
Grant Ramaley
The IAF Medical Device Working Group has updated one of the most important documents that supports the medical device quality system ISO 13485. IAF MD9:2022—“Application of ISO/IEC 17021-1 in the field of medical device quality management systems (ISO 13485)” provides the mandatory requirements for…
Rodney Rohde
Medical laboratory professionals form the backbone of healthcare and the public health system. They conduct some 13 billion laboratory medicine tests annually in the United States. As of February 2022, these individuals had also performed more than 900 million Covid-19 tests and counting during the…
Ryan E. Day
ISO 9001:2015, Clause 6.1 introduces the term “actions to address risks and opportunities,” as a replacement for the standard’s previous term, “preventive actions.” The juxtaposition of “risks” and “opportunities” seems to imply a relational nature between the two concepts. But is it still…
Georgia Institute of Technology
This country’s semiconductor chip shortage is likely to continue well into 2022. Now, a Georgia Tech expert predicts that the United States will need to make major changes to the manufacturing and supply chain of these all-important chips to stave off further effects. That includes making more of…
Silke von Gemmingen
Lettuce is a valuable crop in Europe and the United States. But labor shortages make it difficult to harvest; finding sufficient seasonal labor to meet harvesting commitments is one of the sector’s biggest challenges. Moreover, with wages rising faster than producer prices, margins are tight.
In…
Lisa Anderson
Global supply-chain disruptions are rampant. Manufacturers and business owners now routinely deal with triple and quadruple lead times, widespread shortages, escalating prices, and transportation delays. Every link in the supply chain is out of alignment. Think of the imbalance as a sixth-grader on…
William A. Levinson
The U.S. Military Academy’s Honor Code says that “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” Lt. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the USMA’s superintendent, elaborated, “The tenets of honorable living remain immutable, and the outcomes of our leader development system remain the same,…
Sarah Schiffling, Nikolaos Valantasis Kanellos
Everything was about shortages last year. COVID-19 vaccine shortages at the start of the year were replaced by fears that we would struggle to buy turkeys, toys, or electronic gizmos to put under the Christmas tree. For most of the year, supermarket shelves, car showrooms, and even petrol stations…
Jason Tham
It’s common to hear about how the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted supply chain operations. Supply chain leaders are navigating one of the most difficult periods in recent history, and it’s impossible to foretell an end to global disruptions. What many don’t realize, however, is that the pandemic…
Sabine Terrasi
In intralogistics, there has been a real hype about robotics for some years now, whether in trade journals or at fairs. Most of them are classic six-axis articulated robots that are looking for their way out of a production environment and into logistics. The goal: fully automated small-parts…
Prashant Yadav, Antoine Désir
The pandemic has seen an unprecedented global effort to accelerate the development of safe and effective vaccines as well as a rapid expansion of vaccine manufacturing capacity. However, challenges in further scaling up vaccine manufacturing capacity to meet higher-than-expected demand, and the…
Andrea Luangrath
Consumers who see a product on sale being virtually touched are more engaged and willing to pay more than if the item is displayed on its own, according to a recent research paper I co-authored.
Behavioral economists have previously shown that people value objects more highly if they own them, a…
Adel Guitouni, Cynthia Waltho, Mohammadreza Nematollahi
In 2019, global supply chains moved more than $19 trillion in exported goods. The production and sale of many items we need and use—including toys, clothes, food, electronics, and home furniture—depend on global supply chains.
For most of us, supply chains are no longer an abstract concept. The…
Nicholas Dagalakis
The RoboCrane—now hard at work at the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear cleanup sites—is a good example of a successfully commercialized technology invented at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). I’ll try to tell that story here.
During the early 1980s, the manufacturing of…
