In today's business world, technology has opened the door to reaching and attaining a whole new customer base. The development of e-commerce has presented distributors with the opportunity to target not only businesses but also the individual consumer, converging the B2B and B2C markets.
A recent report suggests that although online sales in the business-to-business sector are growing, those companies should be willing to invest more in e-commerce platforms.
Transportation capacity problems have been a volatile issue over the past 20 years or so. A thorough analysis provided by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, in its "State of Logistics" report, indicates that by 2017, shippers in the U.S. will face shortages in trucking resources again, predominantly a trucker shortage, in the near future due to an array of developments that may cause shippers to find loads left on the ground, shipping costs rapidly escalating, and shrinking profit margins that stun stakeholders.
Almost 25 years after the rise of warehouse management solutions to drive increased customer service levels, there still remain a significant number of Tier 1 distribution-intensive companies that continue to use manual processes to support a growing demand on the warehouse.
Data from the Reshoring Initiative shows it's primarily southern U.S. states that are seeing the benefits of manufacturing companies returning production from overseas.
A study by the Reshoring Initiative shows that 60,000 manufacturing jobs were brought into the U.S. by a combination of reshoring and foreign direct investment in 2014, a record level and 400 percent increase since 2003.
For many manufacturers and distributors, a seamless supply chain of highly efficient and tightly integrated business processes sharing a single unified source of accurate real-time data seems an unachievable goal. That's not surprising since such organizations are struggling to gain control over their entire supply chain using a mix of disparate systems that fail to fully mesh with one another creating silos of outdated and unreliable information.
Cheaper, better robots will replace human workers in the world's factories at a faster pace over the next decade, pushing labor costs down 16 percent, according to the Boston Consulting Group.
The labor shortage in the supply chain and manufacturing industries has been well-documented, and increasingly so as that shortage continues to grow. Female executives at logistics services providers can't stress enough how they'd like to see more women continue to enter the supply chain workforce and break the stereotype of it being "a man’s world."
For states in the northern half of the country, particularly the Midwest and Northeast, tough winters are expected. Prolonged freezing temperatures and heavy snowfalls rarely catch anyone off guard in those regions.