Analyst Insight: It's no secret that the explosion of e-commerce, omnichannel, multichannel and social media - along with large online retailers' offerings - have significantly raised customers' expectations for rapid delivery, free shipping and free returns. Customers are clearly signaling that a company's successes and failures rest on high expectations of price, selection, convenience and experience. Companies must "get local" in order to meet customers' demands for speed of delivery. – John Spain, Partner, Tompkins International
The Procter & Gamble Company plans to build a multi-category manufacturing facility in Berkeley County, West Virginia, in the Eastern Panhandle of the state near the town of Tabler Station. When the plant opens in 2017, it will be one of the most advanced and sustainable plants among P&G's global manufacturing and supply-chain operations.
The tiny African nation of Djibouti measures 23,200 square kilometers and is home to about 800,000 people, but within a few years - and with a little help from the Chinese - it expects to have two brand-new airport hubs large enough to handle 100,000 tonnes of cargo and 2 million passengers annually.
Manufacturers typically evaluate seven critical areas when it comes to operational decision making: transportation and energy costs; market demand for their products; rising labor costs in China and other developing nations; access to talent, tax and regulatory policies; availability of capital; and currency trends.
Relocation of manufacturing and product sourcing to emerging economies is no longer the gold standard for global businesses, according to a study from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville's, Global Supply Chain Institute.
Companies are heavily scrutinizing transportation costs in East Coast and West Coast seaports-and inland cities with strong transportation links-locating facilities in markets best able to serve established and emerging "megapolitan" areas in a quick, cost-effective manner, according to a report from CBRE Group entitled Transportation Cost Equivalence Line: East Coast vs. West Coast Ports.
Major shifts in cost competitiveness around the world over the past decade are starting to spur a number of companies to change their global sourcing and manufacturing investment strategies, according to The Boston Consulting Group's report, The Shifting Economics of Global Manufacturing: How Cost Competitiveness Is Changing Worldwide.
Goodman Group, Australia's largest listed industrial property group, says its wholly owned North American subsidiary, Goodman Birtcher, has received approvals for the development of a proposed $350m logistics center in Linden, N.J. The project is part of the recently announced $1.4bn development pipeline in the key U.S. logistics markets of California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
In 2010, massive flooding in Pakistan profoundly affected the country and disrupted supply chains globally, spiking international prices for cotton, rice and wheat. This was only one in a string of weather disasters - including heat waves, hurricanes and wildfires - that have affected supply chains on a large scale in the past decade.
