News

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.

Consumers will soon be able to quantify the carbon footprint of products they consume, and that could begin to change consumer behavior. The common banana you buy, say organic or not, is probably labeled by the country or origin. Increasingly, you might see a second sticker adorning your beloved yellow fruit – it will be a tally of the banana’s total carbon emissions as it moved from farm to table. That single number is not a simple one.

Fighting illiteracy in Indian villages; facilitating local health reporting in Mexico; creating a mobile logistics app for truck drivers in Colombia. These may sound like projects run by a big non-governmental organization like the United Nations Development Program, but in fact they are three examples of MIT NextLab projects run mainly by MIT students and local organizations in the respective countries.

When it comes to intelligently managing today╒s supply chains, a quick scan of recent headlines underscores just how hard it is becoming to stay in front of global developments. The earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, an outbreak of flu, or last month╒s electric power interruption on the East Coast of the United States that persisted in parts of New York and Massachusetts for nearly a week all point to risks that manufacturers have to deal with on an almost daily basis.

A massive cyclone has hit Karachi, Pakistan, devastating the coastal city. Oil fires are raging in the city’s port and another storm will hit the region in two weeks.

Thankfully, this nightmare disaster scenario is not real, but rather was a crisis simulation that occurred on March 16 testing the abilities of Air Force Reserve Officers Training Core (ROTC) Detachment 365 and members of Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services (ALLIES).

Carriers and shippers can work together to bring about efficiencies in trucking and mitigate the cost of fuel surcharges, says Professor Chris Caplice.

MIT's Center for Transportation and Logistics has always served an interesting role somewhere between academia and the private sector. I've come to think of it as a more academic version of AMR Research (in fact, executives have moved between the two organizations). Most recently in Supply Chain Digest Chris Caplice, Executive Director of the Center, chimed in with his supply chain predictions for 2010. I'll quote a few here and provide my own commentary, but I'd suggest reading the entire column if you have a minute.

Dr. Chris Caplice Executive Director MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics

Universities and Educational Institutions with Supply Chain Education Programs

The Next Billion Network, selected for the Cooper-Hewitt's Design Triennial exhibition, features NextLab projects created in partnership with the MIT Media Lab. NextLab founder and instructor Jhonatan Rotberg is currently a lecturer in MIT Engineering Systems Division and now presides over NextLab 2.0, the next generation of this program, in partnership with Dr. Edgar Blanco, executive director of the MIT Center for Latin American Logistics Innovation. Nextlab 2.0 is being hosted at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics....

Madison, NJ (January 2010) - MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics (MIT CTL) has now identified Damco's carbon management approach as potentially up to 25% more accurate than other approaches....

In February, Yadav and his team also received a $500,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to compare drug forecasting by nonprofit groups with similar efforts in the pharmaceutical industry. Yadav also instigated a two-year work-study program for representatives from the health ministries of developing countries to come to the center in Spain and improve their skills at managing supply chains. “You can’t have good global forecasts unless individual countries can forecast their demands well,” Yadav says.