The Supply Chainer

This week’s episode of the Resilient Supply Chain Podcast examined how supply chain resilience is shifting from recovery planning to faster, earlier decision-making. Hosted by Tom Raftery, the episode featured Abe Eshkenazi, CEO of ASCM, the Association for Supply Chain Management. The discussion focused on agility, supplier visibility, AI, sustainability, cyber risk and the governance pressures now reshaping supply chain leadership. For senior supply chain leaders, the conve

Air freight operators move high-value and condition-sensitive cargo under strict operational limits. Airline regulations restrict radio transmissions during flight. Many tracking devices exhaust batteries quickly or lose connectivity mid-journey. Visibility often fragments when cargo shifts between air, road, warehouse and storage. Operators end up choosing between compliance, battery duration, or continuous monitoring. Solutions from competitors such as Tive, OnAsset Intelli

Operational pressure is mounting for agrifood and manufacturing leaders. Disruptions in key chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz drive sharp increases in costs for fertilizer, feed, fuel, freight, and food. Legacy systems struggle with rapid modeling of interconnected decisions across procurement, inventory, and logistics. Operators face fragmented data, sequential optimization failures, and mounting execution gaps that expose thin margins. According to the FAO, 20-45% of ke

Over the past few months, I've been recording Source Code, a podcast where we sit down with the people actually doing procurement. Not analysts describing it from a distance, but operators who've spent careers in the middle of it. Three episodes in, a common theme stood out: many of procurement’s issues aren’t new, but are becoming even harder to ignore. The dual-source lesson hasn't actually landed. Kris Stasukaitis has spent nearly two decades running mechanical commodity m

When retailers operate across marketplaces, dropship networks, and direct-to-consumer channels simultaneously, inventory accuracy becomes a distributed coordination problem. Stock levels fragment across enterprise resource planning systems,...

Amazon Inc. continues to deepen its logistics footprint in the United States. The company has expanded its Less-Than-Truckload services to all businesses. This allows palletized shipments to any US destination. The move immediately pressured shares of established LTL carriers. Operational Pressure on Incumbents Old Dominion, FedEx Freight and Saia experienced notable declines. Investors weighed the potential for new competition from Amazon's vast network of warehouses, trucks

Vessels facing prolonged anchorage in the Gulf prior to transiting the Strait of Hormuz encounter accelerated biofouling buildup, directly impacting operational performance and supply chain costs. Extended stationary time in warm saline waters promotes rapid organism settlement on hulls, increasing hydrodynamic drag, fuel consumption, and overall voyage expenses. Dr. Mario N. Tamburri of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and Director of the Maritime

Walmart is directing more suppliers toward a centralized consolidation model that replaces fragmented less-than-truckload shipments with coordinated full-truckload deliveries to a single intake point. The shift reduces per-unit transportati...

A sourcing manager reviews supplier risk alerts flagged across three dashboards, each showing different assessments of the same vendor's delivery performance. Finance tracks one version of contract spend, procurement monitors another set of...

The Ocean Foundation watches the Strait of Hormuz the way the energy desks do — but our attention is below the waterline. As the world’s community foundation for the ocean, we see the current crisis in the Strait through two lenses that the freight and commodity markets tend to miss: the transfer of invasive species and the climate and pollution costs of a global fleet now operating under abnormal conditions. Both are converging into a supply chain risk that will not remain s

Organizations struggling to translate procurement visibility into operational outcomes face a problem that has little to do with access to information. The core challenge is volume, fragmentation, and the inability to convert intelligence i...

The International Maritime Organization estimates that disruptions related to geopolitical conflicts and extreme weather have increased crew decision-making workload by approximately 40 percent since 2021, creating strain on both operationa...