News

Warren Buffett said that in Business, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” It has been more than two decades now since a 1996 issue of Life magazine depicted a Pakistani boy sewing a Nike soccer ball, reportedly for six cents per hour. After the story, the company lost more than half its market capitalization in just one year – it took Nike six years of demonstrated social responsibility to recuperate.

Companies and cities in the US are banning plastic straws ostensibly in an effort to curb the huge volumes of plastic waste being dumped in the world’s oceans.

But the real reason for these bans has more to do with corporate image-building than environmental sustainability.

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, September 5, 2018 – An MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics (MIT CTL) research project titled “Converting Zombies into Learners: Improving MITx MicroMasters MOOC Learner Retention” has been awarded a grant of more than $ 124,000 by the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili).    

When the 3PL Value Creation North America Summit 2018 convenes in Chicago this October, shippers will hear from a diverse group of industry experts on how to drive the best deals with their lead providers in both the global and domestic arenas.

The Walt Disney Co. announced late last month it will eliminate single-use plastic straws and plastic stirrers at all owned and operated locations across the globe.

Disney introduced the ban in response to concerns over the amount of waste plastic being dumped in the world’s oceans. The company described the decision as “another important step in our journey of environmental stewardship.”

MIT AgeLab Research Scientist Bryan Reimer spoke at a TEDx event in Waltham, MA about the challenges ahead for making vehicles safer and what solutions are most sensible. Road traffic injuries are the 8th-leading cause of death worldwide. Over 1.25 million fatalities and 50 million non-fatal injuries occur per year globally. By many measures, traffic accidents represent a vastly undertreated public health crisis.

NINGBO, CHINA, July 25, 2018 - The 11th International Conference of Chinese Scholars Association of Management Science and Engineering (CSAMSE) was hosted by the Ningbo Supply Chain Innovation Institute China, a member of MIT Global SCALE (Supply Chain and Logistics Excellence) Network, from July 14-16, with the theme of “Building Intelligent Supply Chains”. The conference arranged 4 keynote speeches, 2 industrial panel discussions, the Young Scholars Colloquium, the Female Scholar Luncheon and 46 technical sessions.

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, July 3, 2018 – The Master’s Program of MIT Global SCALE (Supply Chain and Logistics Excellence) Network has been ranked as the world's No. 1 graduate business program in supply chain and logistics by Eduniversal. The Paris-based global rating agency for higher education ranked the MIT SCALE master’s program as No.

For most companies, sustainability is not a simple case of “profits vs. planet” but a more subtle issue of people looking for jobs and inexpensive goods versus others who seek a pristine environment. Here’s how your supply chain can satisfy these conflicting motivations to achieve both economic growth and environmental sustainability.

Read More

Supply chain resilience has received a considerable amount of attention over the last decade or so, and although companies have achieved much in making their supply chains more resilient, many are still unprepared for disruptions. For example, a 2017 Zurich Business Continuity Institute survey with 400 responses found that 23% of the respondents experienced a supply chain disruption leading to at least $1 million losses and 9% experienced a loss in excess of $100 million.

If you’re one of the countless people wringing their hands over the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI) taking over the world, you might want to take a closer look at the kind of world AI is supposedly inheriting.

It’s a world where human flexibility and adaptability are needed more than ever.

AI can outperform humans in various ways but dealing with unrelenting change is not one of them – especially the fevered variety we are now subject to every day.

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, May 18, 2018 – The MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics announced a new scholarship in partnership with AWESOME (Achieving Women’s Excellence in Supply Chain Operations,  Management and Education), an industry-wide organization for senior-level women in the supply chain field.

Yossi Sheffi, Director of the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics, has done it again.

Yossi Sheffi says,

Densely populated and digitally connected megacities will create an urgent demand for inner-city, hyperlocal fulfillment centers says Dr. Matthias Winkenbach, Director of the MIT Megacity Logistics Lab.

Winkenbach’s analysis is part of a new white paper titled Roadmap for Change: The Flexible Industrial Distribution Facilities Network of the Future published by the Industrial Asset Management Council (IAMC).

In a new book, MIT professor Yossi Sheffi examines the trade-offs companies face when grappling with sustainability issues.

In 2010, the environmental group Greenpeace launched an online campaign against Nestle, the food-production giant. Nestle’s KitKat bars, the campaign charged, contained palm oil supplied by a company that was improperly clearing rainforests.

Last month, for the first time, a pedestrian was killed in an accident involving a self-driving car. A sports-utility vehicle controlled by an autonomous algorithm hit a woman who was crossing the road in Tempe, Arizona. The safety driver inside the vehicle was unable to prevent the crash.

he autonomous-car industry faces closer scrutiny and criticism after a self-driving Uber killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, on Sunday evening.

Full details of the accident are unclear, but the local police department issued a statement saying that a woman was fatally struck after walking in front of an Uber car traveling in self-driving mode. Uber says it is cooperating with a police investigation and has suspended testing of its self-driving vehicles in Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Toronto.

More consumers are interacting with businesses through messaging and chat apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, or through audio technology devices such as Amazon’s Echo product. This chatter is often called conversational commerce. How might it impact supply chains?

Brian Subirana, Director of the MIT Auto-ID Lab, will explore the implications at the forthcoming Crossroads 2018 conference, on April 17th, at the MIT campus, Cambridge MA.

Using drones to deliver packages requires the aerial delivery vehicles to navigate a complex logistics obstacle course at high speeds. MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has developed a system called NanoMap, that allows drones to consistently fly at 20 miles per hour through dense environments such as warehouses.

Are we learning to trust self-drive vehicle technology?

With the introduction of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), all players within the pharmaceutical industry are confronting the challenge of implementing a serialized drug tracing system with little guidance on data standards, roles, or accountability.

In 2015 The Economist magazine famously dubbed blockchain technology “the trust machine” owing to its ability to create trust in business networks. This capability resonates strongly in the supply chain world, where a lack of trust is a major obstacle to high-level collaboration. The promise of blockchain may be fulfilled in time, but at present its progress is impeded by – ironically – a lack of trust in the technology.

In early January, 40 students from around the world landed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to embark on their first semester at MIT. Though it was the first time they had set foot on campus, they weren’t new to MIT courses by any stretch.