Logistics

In their 2016 Logistics Trend Radar, gGlobal logistics company DHL has identified 3 megatrends that are shaping the future of the transportation industry.

The technology that manages our supply chains, delivers our packages and powers logistics analytics is changing at a stunning rate. From drones to wearables, transportation management systems (TMS) to dashboards, it can be challenging for companies to stay on top of what is available and find meaningful ways to incorporate it into their shipping process.

Minimizing the costs of doing business can be tricky and time-consuming, so an increasing number of companies are looking to group purchasing organizations (GPOs) to help them save money.

The transportation and logistics vendor landscape is highly fragmented, due largely to the numerous moving parts it takes to get a manufacturer’s product from concept design through production and all the way to the end-user’s hands.

Today, nearly every company has a chief procurement officer (CPO) leading a sourcing team in search of annual cost reductions. Over time, however, this laser focus on prices and costs has driven a commoditization of offerings that has limited competition among suppliers merely to the best price for a given specification.

There’s quite a political donnybrook going on in Michigan right now, as business leaders froth at the crumbling condition of the state’s roads, while politicians scramble to finger new funding sources after voters in early May solidly rejected the idea of boosting sales taxes to pay for the repairs. But some experts—in particular Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who wrote the book, Move: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead—believe other states and cities easily could find themselves in the same place.

CEOs need to merge their disparate IT systems to keep growing—but must do so carefully. The cloud can help.

One of the last major business successes of 2014 was how America’s biggest parcel shippers, UPS and FedEx, returned to form and made sure nearly all of their express packages were delivered across the United States by Christmas, after failing miserably at that task the year before.

The University of Tennessee set out to research some of the world’s most successful strategic partnerships—including those at P&G, McDonald’s and Microsoft—to see how and why these relationships added value. The research identified five principles that CEOs everywhere can use to transform supplier relationships.

Is your company overweight, bloated, and out of shape? Is it burdened by rolls of inventory fat? Just how far from "just-in-time" is your...