Resilient supply chains are crucial to maintaining the consistent delivery of goods and services to the American people. The modern economy has made supply chains more interconnected than ever, while also expanding both their range and fragility. In the third quarter of 2017, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria revealed some significant vulnerabilities in the national and regional supply chains of Texas, Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico.
December 20, 2019 • Articles
Education leaders at MIT have received a pair of Silver Awards and a Bronze Award at the QS Reimagine Education Awards, an international conference on education held annually in December.
October 29, 2019 • Press Releases
Report details urgent need to reform policies on factory-built housing
Constructing factory-built houses could provide a fast, relatively cheap solution to the critical challenges of disaster and affordable housing in the US, but regulatory and funding issues severely limit its deployment according to a report titled Disaster Housing Construction Challenges in America from the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab.
October 08, 2019 • Press Releases
The MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics and the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) have teamed up to launch the annual State of Sustainable Supply Chains Report that will help companies gain a better understanding of the importance of supply chain sustainability to their enterprises, industries, and the planet.
September 27, 2019 • Press Releases
Incoming director Jay Guo commits to educating individuals and supporting industry at the Supply Chain Innovation Institute
The Ningbo Supply Chain Innovation Institute China (NSCIIC) has strengthened its role as China's premier center for supply chain research and education with the appointment of Dr. Jiequn “Jay” Guo as center director and the opening of new facilities at its Meishan campus near the port of Ningbo, Zhejiang, China.
September 16, 2019 • Articles
A new methodology developed by the Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab may be used to respond to other endemic diseases. Research on the logistics of responding to Ebola outbreaks has revealed that an often-overlooked, but critical, factor in resource deployment to treat victims of the disease is how many of the people in treatment centers are Ebola-negative.
August 30, 2019 • Press Releases
Chris Caplice PhD ’96, executive director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, has been appointed MIT senior research scientist for his long-term commitment to research and education in supply chain management.
Over the past two decades, Caplice has developed and deployed theoretical models and educational innovations that have had a global impact on supply chain practice and education. In 2016, Caplice was named a Silver Family Research Fellow and became the only non-faculty member at MIT to receive an endowed chair.
August 23, 2019 • Articles
InterContinental Hotels Group will replace mini-shampoos and conditioners with possibly more efficient bulk products by the year 2021. But environmental activists shouldn’t rejoice just yet. The announcement is yet another example – such as banning plastic straws, false sustainability claims and corporate commitments that are far in the future – that seem to be more of a PR exercise than real attempts to move the needle.
August 21, 2019 • MIT CTL Thought Leadership
Battery-powered heavy-duty trucks emit lower volumes of greenhouse gases and polluting particulates than conventional diesel-powered trucks, but they must haul weighty battery units that reduce their revenue-earning payloads. Researchers at MIT’s Energy Initiative and Plasma Fusion and Science Center (PFSC) have developed a possible solution: a plug-in hybrid engine system that transitions big long haul rigs to electric power.
In addition to overcoming the weight penalty of all-battery power, the concept engine is significantly cheaper than diesel units and performs just as well in most operating conditions.
August 20, 2019 • Articles
The concept of supply chain transparency was virtually unknown 15 years ago, yet today it commands the attention of mid- and senior-level managers across a broad spectrum of companies and industries. The reasons for this increased interest are clear: Companies are under pressure from governments, consumers, NGOs, and other stakeholders to divulge more information about their supply chains, and the reputational cost of failing to meet these demands can be high.
August 08, 2019 • MIT CTL Thought Leadership
The recent announcement by UPS that it will start delivering packages on Sundays next year is another sign of the inexorable growth of e-commerce — and the number of delivery trucks on the roads. More vehicles equal more fuel consumed and more CO2 emitted, increasing the pressure on companies to invest in fuel efficiency technology.
July 25, 2019 • Articles
What could be better than a graduate level education from one of the country’s best supply chain management programs? How about a graduate degree with training from two of the country’s best supply chain management programs. In some respects, that’s the rationale behind a 100% online Master’s program offered on the edX platform that was recently announced by MIT and Arizona State University, ranked numbers 2 and 3 on U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of graduate supply chain management programs.
July 24, 2019 • MIT CTL Thought Leadership
Omnichannel retailing has become the new norm in the retail sector as companies reinvent their supply chains to offer customers multiple buying channels. Although the omnichannel model is now relatively well established, a challenge that retailers continued to grapple with is how to reconfigure their last-mile supply networks (LMSNs) to achieve better alignment between delivery responsiveness, product variety, and convenience.
July 19, 2019 • Articles
MIT CTL researchers have been making headlines in recent weeks. A range of topics encompassing last-mile delivery, sustainable logistics, the future of aging, and financial literacy, has generated a flurry of media activity including radio, TV, and podcasts.
July 19, 2019 • Articles
The MIT SCALE master's programs have been ranked #1 Supply Chain Management programs in the world for the fourth consecutive year by Paris-based EdUniversal.
EdUniversal has evaluated academic institutions and programs in France since 1994, and internationally since 2007. Its rankings are based on criteria including overall program reputation, career and salary outcomes of recent graduates, international reach, and feedback from students and alumni.
July 17, 2019 • MIT CTL Thought Leadership
Amazon has been moving into package delivery using many of its assets, prompting observers to ponder whether the retail giant now has UPS, USPS, and FedEx in its competitive sights.
Amazon uses its own delivery network for almost half (47.6 percent and growing) of its shipments. As it has done with its fulfillment services, will it grow to challenge the existing integrators and become a common carrier?
July 12, 2019 • MIT CTL Thought Leadership
The Trump administration’s “America First” battle cry in trade negotiations may curry favor among its supporters in the United States, but weaponizing trade policy in this way undermines the fine-tuned supply chains that companies have meticulously constructed over recent decades.
Consumers across the globe — including Americans — ultimately pay the price in the form of more expensive goods and elevated uncertainty.
July 11, 2019 • MIT CTL Thought Leadership
Driven by increasing volumes of goods moving through supply chains across the globe, demand for freight transportation is expected to triple over the next few years. If we continue shipping goods as we do today, freight emissions will surpass energy as the most carbon-intensive sector by 2050, doubling carbon emissions by 2050.
Despite these grim predictions, there is a clear path forward for green freight. Using well-established efficiency techniques and existing/near-term green freight technologies, we can keep emissions at bay while still allowing businesses to grow.
A rapid and widespread change of course is required to achieve this mission — and that change needs to be tracked and communicated using the de facto metric of the sustainability movement and the language of the Paris Agreement: carbon emissions.
June 18, 2019 • Press Releases
On June 6, the MIT AgeLab, in partnership with AARP, presented the fourth annual OMEGA scholarship awards to three accomplished young adults from New England. Sidonie Brown from Brookline High School in Brookline, Massachusetts, Brook Masse from Mount Greylock Regional High School in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and Jay Park from Newton South High School in Newton, Massachusetts, were each awarded a 2019 OMEGA scholarship.
June 06, 2019 • Articles
The origins of many items on our tables are unknown to the everyday consumer. However new technologies and traditional ways of farming are beginning to close this information gap between farmer and consumer. As a result demand from consumers for better information could transform our food system from the ground up. “That single package of ground beef can be coming from hundreds of different sources,” says Alexis Bateman, the director of the Responsible Supply Chain Lab at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. “In the seafood industry, there’s a lot of actual fraud…so people want to make sure it’s the right fish.” Recently, people have been realizing there is something lacking from their diets: quality information.
May 14, 2019 • Articles
Every decision is the right one as long as it works for the family.
This story was intended to share perspectives on bringing families with children to Cambridge from abroad while studying at MIT. These are our stories as ten-month and five-month on-campus Master’s candidates. While writing it together, we had some enlightening arguments. We talked about the roles of men and women in families, the difference between moms and dads in children’s eyes, gender equality, and the social perceptions of it.
May 13, 2019 • Articles
With greater longevity, the quest to avoid the infirmities of aging is more urgent than ever.
Aging, like bankruptcy in Hemingway’s description, happens two ways, slowly and then all at once. The slow way is the familiar one: decades pass with little sense of internal change, middle age arrives with only a slight slowing down—a name lost, a lumbar ache, a sprinkling of white hairs and eye wrinkles.
May 13, 2019 • Articles
With the implementation of 5G wireless, IoT’s B2B services will speed up, but will the logistics sector be ready for the ride?
Technologies related to shipping and logistics technologies are accelerating. The rollout over the next few years of 5G wireless will bring with it the speeding up of the Internet of Things (IoT), an ability of machines to instantaneously communicate with us and with each other.
February 06, 2019 • Press Releases
The Lifestyle Leaders Panel convened at MIT AgeLab in the Center for Transportation and Logistics for a presentation and focus group session on transportation in older age.
February 04, 2019 • Press Releases
The winning finalists of the AWE - Advancing Women Through Education scholarship were awarded at MIT on 30 January 2019. The award, to be given annually and currently valued at $72,000, is the first ever full-tuition award specifically for women in the 20-year history of the MIT SCM program. It represents a significant commitment by MIT SCM, the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics, and AWESOME to encourage women to prepare for and perform successfully in supply chain leadership roles.