Commentary

Pumpkin Spice Pandemonium

Pumpkin spice mania is a fall tradition in the United States. Here’s how seasonality blended with limited supplies jacks up demand.

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E-Commerce Business Owner Perspective: Joining Forces with Fulfillment by Amazon Businesses

Partnering with firms that leverage Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) helped take our business to the next level.

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Winning in a Contract Market

Freight market volatility keeps us on our toes, and we can expect that to continue. Many carriers are shifting their focus from spot to contract freight, which creates a fantastic opportunity for shippers to optimize their supply chain by adapting their carrier strategy. Here are some proven practices for doing so.

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Four Tips to Strengthen Cybersecurity

Supply chain problems continue to dominate headlines across the globe. In response, companies seek ways to increase visibility to help build more resilient supply chains. However, increasing the pace of digital transformation opens up an array of vulnerabilities that cybercriminals actively take advantage of. Shoring up cyber defenses is critical for logistics providers and shippers in particular, where a breach can have significant consequences.

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Supply Chain Strain: How to Navigate Disruption

Now that we’ve been in a pandemic for more than two years, it’s funny to look back at our optimism at the beginning. We expected brief supply chain interruptions and thought that things would be back to normal in a few short months. Then we realized it could drag on for a year or more. But almost three years?

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Robots: Walmart Advances, Amazon Retreats

When faced with anticipated fall-off in consumer purchases, Walmart leans into new robotic solutions. The retailer also re-tasks existing store infrastructure by attaching market fulfillment centers (MFCs)—compact warehouses inside, or tacked onto, retail stores to help fulfill pickup or delivery orders. It gets inventory closer to the customer and amps delivery velocity to serve consumers […]

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Keeping the Supply Chain Running in Ukraine

Since 2020, the business landscape has been full of crises for 3PLs operating in Europe. First a worldwide pandemic, now a war between Russia and Ukraine. Keeping a supply chain operating efficiently is challenging in the best of times, but how can companies best respond during game changing disruptions? Yuriy Ostapyak, a Ukrainian-born U.S. citizen and COO for Logistics Plus joined the Inbound Logistics podcast to discuss his company’s response to these challenges.

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Becoming a Successful Female Mentor in Male-Centric Industries

Countless published articles talk about the importance and value of mentorship, and we heard many of these voices during Women’s History Month in March. Many of these articles strike home at the essence and reasons why mentorship is especially critical for professional women in the workforce.

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The Trucking Industry By-the-Numbers: The Long Haul

As the engine of the U.S. economy, the trucking industry carries around 11 billion tons of freight per year, keeping goods moving and the supply chain humming.

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The Future of the Supply Chain is Cloudy

We hear a lot about the cloud these days. The cloud (public or private) refers to software and services that run on the Internet instead of locally on your computer. There is a good chance that the majority of business data will eventually reside in the cloud.

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You Can Add Value to Your Brand Through Last-Mile Delivery

Retailers in a post-COVID world know better than anyone that growing their business by diversifying what they offer is a surefire way to solidify customer loyalty. In today’s highly competitive retail environment, delivery as a brand extension is a critical differentiator.

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IL Good Question: If you could invent one tool to help you do your job better, what would it be?

Readers reveal the yet-to-be-invented tools that would be supply chain game-changers as well as the most recent innovations starting to make their jobs easier.

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Are Bad Deliveries Ruining Your Last Mile? Here’s How to Flip the Script

While the chaos of supply chains has been tamed from its pandemic peak, new disruptions are being forecast and the holiday shopping season will only compound those issues. 

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Shipping Containers: What Do the Cans Tell Us?

What can we learn from the movements of shipping containers, or cans? Plenty. Here’s how they provide clues about future global trading patterns.

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Why IoT is Not the Answer

Global supply chain disruption is not caused by a lack of data—more than 10 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices deployed worldwide add more data every second to already overflowing data stores, yet disruption persists. More IoT is not the answer. The real challenge is creating effective connections between numerous stakeholders performing a range of functions, across multiple enterprise platforms and in different jurisdictions.

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How You Can Respond to Lingering Port Congestion Problems

We’re not experiencing a traditional peak retail shipping season this year. If you’re a shipper and hoped the decreased volumes would transfer to the ports, hopes are fading that you’ll see relief there.

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Good Question: What phrase would you create to describe a supply chain trend or development?

From the “productization of delivery” (think super delivery) to “dot plot mania,” readers get creative and coin terms describing the latest supply chain developments.

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Inflation Innovation Stagnation

Achieving demand-driven enterprise status would have been impossible without the innovative technology-driven processes brought to bear on how we source, ship, and fulfill product, all while meeting evolving customer needs and demands.

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5 Ways to Prepare for Supply Chain Disruptions

If we’ve learned anything during the past two years, it has been about market disruptions—even to the point of the disruptions being disrupted. While accurate crystal balls are tough to come by, let’s explore five trends and how they may provide clues to solve for continued supply chain disruptions.

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Prioritizing Meaningful and Safe Work

We must create a supply chain—link by link—with working conditions where everyone, from the warehouse employee to the end consumer, wins.

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