Posts

Archives

SUPPLY CHAIN — NA, BLOG

Beyond Resiliency: The New Supply Chain Trends from NASCES23

At the beginning of 2023 we started a new reoccurring series on this blog where we try to summarize what happened at each of our events: NASRS23 in a Nutshell, NAMES23 in a Nutshell, PMWS23 in a Nutshell, EUSCES23 in a Nutshell, NASCES23 in a Nutshell, and NAFS23 in a Nutshell all do a fine job of walking through what happened hour by hour and day by day, but the trouble with summaries is they do not leave a lot of extra room for notes about conversations I had on site, or themes and moods I picked up on that…

Continue reading
SUPPLY CHAIN — NA, BLOG

NASCES23 in a Nutshell

The 2023 edition of the long-running and successful North American Supply Chain Executive Summit series ran September 11th through the 13th at the historic Arizona Biltmore, a Waldorf Astoria Resort, in Phoenix, Arizona. It was attended by 640 delegates, speakers, sponsor representatives, and guests from more than 400 different companies and organizations. The agenda included more than 65 keynotes, case studies, workshops, roundtable discussions, focus groups, interactive think tanks, and more. Early feedback has been universally positive, and work is already underway to build upon this success and make next year’s summit event bigger and better. That is the shortest…

Continue reading
SUPPLY CHAIN — NA, BLOG, SUPPLY CHAIN — EUROPE

Building Competitive Advantage as Companies Localize and Regionalize Their Supply Chain Network

If you spend your career in any specific field, you will see themes and trends and moods and styles and eras come and go over the course of your working life that are defined by a single issue or pressure or innovation that shapes everything else you do for a time. Supply Chain professionals are no different, and right now as we come out the far side of a pandemic, we are in an extended moment where frequent disruptions of all shapes and sizes are now accepted as a business norm, and all anyone wants to talk about is building…

Continue reading
BLOG

Avoiding the Curse of Shelfware

A universal fear of anyone who buys new equipment or systems for their company is that they might make the wrong choice and end up with nothing to show for their outlay of expense and effort but a never-used user manual that sits somewhere in their office, mocking them every time they look at it. Whatever they were trying to do with the best of intentions, somehow instead of hardware or software all they ended up with was shelfware. I love the word shelfware. Even just the sound of it conveys disappointment and defeat wrapped up in a vague but…

Continue reading
BLOG

Supply Chain Jargon for the Supply Chain Adjacent

Every business that buys something, sells something, or moves something has a supply chain organization. The people who spend their working lives making things arrive where and when they are needed in the quantity and quality expected are professionals, and like most professions they have developed their own vocabulary for what they are doing and what they are thinking. Today’s blog post is not for those people. For most of my columns I try to write for as many of the people in Executive Platforms’ network as possible, and supply chain leaders are probably the single largest demographic who engage…

Continue reading