News

Major changes underway in supply chain thinking can improve company profitability. To participate in this fundamental transformation, MIT Senior Lecturer Jonathan L.S. Byrnes says supply chain managers need to take three important steps.

Supply chain management is a relatively young discipline, yet it is already undergoing significant changes. These changes stem from two important developments that are connected with the shift from logistics to the more comprehensive discipline of supply chain management:

Hiring next year will heat up in several fields, including one with a decidedly unglamorous image: supply chain management.

Everybody has heard by now that health care companies are promising hunting grounds for job seekers, and the New Year will see hiring perk up elsewhere, too.

But when you think of fields where there just aren't enough skilled candidates to go around, one that probably doesn't come to mind is supply chain management: The complicated, behind-the-scenes work of getting goods from one place to another, on time and on budget.

An aging population brings with it a new set of demands — such as the need to ensure safety among older drivers. As the Baby-Boomer generation begins reaching retirement age, this seems likely to become a growing concern. Joseph Coughlin, the founder and director of MIT’s AgeLab, and director of the New England University Transportation Center, testified this week in Washington at a forum on aging and driving held by the National Transportation Safety Board.

AgeLab study: Driver-assistance systems can increase wellness and safety behind the wheel

Any driver knows it can be hard to remain calm behind the wheel. But perhaps high-tech tools can help. A new study by MIT researchers, announced Thursday, suggests that driver-assistance technologies lower the amount of stress people feel when behind the wheel.

Read the full news article at MIT News.

Yossi Sheffi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the school's Center for Transportation and Logistics, discusses the outlook for air cargo security following last week's discovery of explosive devices in packages. Greek police detonated a parcel bomb addressed to the French Embassy in Athens today and are investigating at least two more packages, the latest in a spate of mail bombings targeting embassies and European leaders. Sheffi speaks with Mark Crumpton on Bloomberg Television's "Bottom Line."

Yossi Sheffi (Elisha Gray II professor of engineering systems and civil & environmental engineering, director of the MIT Engineering Systems Division, and director of the Center for Transportation and Logistics) will be featured in an upcoming episode of the CNBC series Executive Vision. The series, now in its second season, is a "global strategy session" in which host Simon Hobbs and a panel of renowned experts and leaders discuss provocative issues affecting major business sectors.

Joseph F. Coughlin is the founder and director of the AgeLab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and leads the New England University Transportation Center. He is co-editor, with Lisa D’Ambrosio, of the forthcoming book "Aging America and Transportation."

When a Vermillion Oil platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico early last month, the event extended a raging debate over deep-water drilling that started last April with the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. While the environmental consequences and billions of dollars in costs to clean up these spills hold immense consequences, there is another, overlooked dimension to the debate: the vulnerability of the country’s ports to such calamities.

A study of the U.S. port system under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center

On October 13, 2010, an alliance between the Discovery Channel and Quo science magazine (Mexico) had an event to celebrate "Quo+Discovery Minds." This is a nationwide search for the most innovative ideas and projects developed by Mexican citizens in the last 10 years.  

New England Center Researchers Awarded IEEE Best Paper CTL AgeLab student Ji Hyun (MIT PhD '08) and co-authors Zhi-Hong Mao, Louis Tijerina, Tom Pilutti, Joseph F. Coughlin and Eric Feron won the IEEE Systems, Man & Cybernetics Society (SMCS) Andrew P. Sage Best Transactions Paper Award for their article, "Detection of driver fatigue caused by sleep deprivation."

A recent study by Vinod Singhal of Georgia Tech and Yossi Sheffi of MIT indicates that companies experiencing a supply chain disruption suffered between a 33% and 40% decline in stock price, compared with industry peers over a three year period.

Supply chain managers are uniquely positioned to consider - and benefit from - sustainability initiatives. Edgar Blanco of the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics says there are four key opportunities.

The operation and management of today's global supply chain continues to challenge executives worldwide. The supply chain experts interviewed here identified about a dozen trends currently under study, offering a peak into what could affect supply chains in the near future.

Airliners can lose one engine and keep flying. Nuclear power plants have two cooling systems, in case one fails. In an explosion, coal mines must allow miners two paths to escape.

So why didn’t BP have a working Plan B?

Or, what happens when the big gorilla grabs all the bananas?

Wal-Mart Stores recently started an initiative to take control of the inbound transportation of products from its vendors to its own distribution centers and, in some cases, direct to its own stores.

As reported by Bloomberg, Kelly Abney, Wal-Mart’s vice president of corporate transportation, indicated Wal-Mart would take over deliveries of inbound freight where they can reduce costs.

MIT CTL & ARAGÓN GOVERNMENT LAUNCH NEW 10-YEAR AGREEMENT

Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC) to be a worldwide model in Supply Chain Management

Conscious of  these shortcomings and with an eye to expanding its global  influence, MIT’s Center for Transportation & Logistics (CTL) teamed with the Bogotá-based consultancy LOGyCA in 2008 to create an education and research facility in the city aimed at  helping graduates and educators to tackle the issue.

Companies routinely invest large amounts of money in research and development to delivery to best products to bea the competition. While the latest technology, sharpest design and lowest cost are important, there's another secret that many companies overlook: the supply chain.

MIT has teamed up to create an education and research facility to address the region's poor infrastructure.

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." That's what we were taught in school. An international survey of attitudes towards supply-chain risk carried out by the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics affirms that the adage has sunk in: Professional managers worldwide show a marked preference for prevention over response when it comes to managing risk. But as Iceland's volcano has so vividly shown, we can't prevent — let alone anticipate — all disruptions. Companies need to pay a lot more attention to the response side of the crisis-management equation.

The Vodafone Americas Foundation and the mHealth Alliance (a coalition of the United Nations Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Vodafone Americas Foundation) announced that Sana had won the mHealth Alliance Award (valued at $50,000) and finished third in the Wireless Innovation Prize ($100,000) at the Global Philanthropy Forum on April 19, 2010. These awards recognize Sana’s new applications for wireless technology and its potential to address health challenges in low-resource settings.

A pilot project in Zambia has shown that strategic improvements in the supply chain for lifesaving drugs can have an immediate and dramatic impact on child mortality. Pediatric malaria drugs—so essential to save children’s lives—are now available in 88 percent of public health centers in trial districts, nearly double the 51 percent availability rate in control districts.

Here’s one more reason that supply chains are so interesting (you already know the others): every supply chain is a ready-built collection of modern-day innovation levers, whether managers take advantage of those levers or not. All those diverse inputs, all that cross-boundary creative collaboration (“friction,” even), all the visibility into so many organizational silos, and all those multi-level sources of on-the-ground information that, if attention is paid, can answer questions you didn’t even know you had. Managed right, a supply chain can be an organization’s neural network.

Pauli Immonen is quick-marching the length of the tarmac at Port-au-Prince’s crippled airport, looking for a missing 737. It’s not as if he can just check the arrivals board — the 7.0 earthquake that rocked the Haitian capital eight days ago has left the main terminal a flooded, deserted husk. The floors are littered with broken ceiling tiles, and inch-wide cracks snake along the walls. Outside, Immonen skirts a blacktop crowded with military transports and chartered jets; the flock of small planes that usually roosts here has been forced onto an adjacent patch of grass.

Ford is participating in an advanced research project exploring the use of technology to identify when drivers are under stress and help to alleviate it.

The six-month project, which began in January, will identify stress-inducing situations, use biometrics to monitor the driver's reaction and evaluate new stress-reducing features that could be incorporated into future automobiles.