Strength is returning to the market for mid-sized warehouses, though vacancies remain high for facilities of 100,000 to 200,000 square feet, says Rob Wheeler, vice president for industrial services at Cresa Chicago. Cresa Chicago is a real estate firm that works only with tenants. With 55 offices in North America, it is "the biggest real estate firm you've never heard of," Wheeler says.
SAP America, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Germany's SAP AG, has agreed to acquire Ariba, the software vendor specializing in procurement and business-to-business commerce.
The demand for vendor-managed inventory programs in warehouses behaves "as a pendulum swinging back and forth between supplier and retailer," says John Mayer, vice president of sales with Park City Group. Over the last six to 12 months, he says, it has swung back in the direction of favoring VMI. Mayer has seen particular interest in the technique in the grocery industry.
International transportation management, value engineering and strategic collaboration are three cornerstones of Menlo Worldwide's 4PL service offering, says Nick Caragher, director of 4PL operations.
As the role of cloud computing is growing significantly in its ability to deliver business applications, many IT decision makers are facing challenges with their existing network infrastructure to support the migration of their business applications to the cloud.
What began as a trickle of stories about challenges to China's supposed economic dominance has become a steady flow. It began with revelations of working conditions at Chinese factories. Soon we were reading about rising wages in the industrial sector - great for Chinese workers, but sure to make the country a less attractive source of cheap manufacturing for the West. Then there was the recent slowdown in China's foreign direct investment, along with the nation's struggle to create an economy that's geared more toward domestic consumption in the service of a growing middle class. Meanwhile, serious questions persist about the stability of China's banking system. And just last week, we learned that China's trade surplus with the U.S. is rapidly shrinking, as the country wrestles with the consequences of a stronger yuan.
"Sales Carbon Operations Planning" (SCOP) offers a new take on supply-chain management, bringing together traditional sales and operations planning (S&OP) techniques and the need for companies to track and reduce their carbon emissions. "It's my way of making it easy to transfer into sustainability with your existing processes," says Silvia Leahu-Aluas, owner of Sustainable Manufacturing Consulting. The new term covers everything from basic carbon dioxide management to a full understanding of the economic and environmental impact of greenhouse gas emissions.
You could call inventory and warehouse space the twin evils of the supply chain. Both are big drags on the balance sheet. So it should come as no surprise that the two categories are lagging the recovery - or what's passing for one.
