T. Boone Pickens to keynote Annual Global Conference
Is your supply chain being held captive by the price of oil? Can natural gas help? The iconic energy executive T. Boone Pickens thinks so.
Pickens and Clean Energy CEO Andrew Littlefair will kick off CSCMP's Annual Global Conference (September 30 to October 3 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA) by looking at the current state of global energy supply, America's oil crisis, and how domestic natural gas could replace diesel and gasoline, bringing competitiveness and prosperity for the trucking industry.
The conference's closing presentation will feature motivational speaker Erik Wahl's creative and entertaining presentation, "The Art of Vision." Wahl will show how breakthrough thinking leads to extraordinary results and will identify ways to utilize unconventional wisdom to build a strategic vision for the future.
In addition to the opening and closing keynotes, the conference will include educational sessions, roundtable discussions, exhibits, networking opportunities, and distribution facility tours. For example, the 24 educational session tracks will cover a wide range of topics, such as managing innovation in technology, supply chain ideas that changed the world, talent and leadership, and how to manage capital-intensive supply chains, to name just a few.
Other special events include the 2012 Educators Conference, the Supply Chain of the Future exhibition, and full-day, pre-conference workshops. The four workshops will include: Building and Maintaining Business Relationships; Leveraging Supply Chain Management for Enterprise Development; Supply Chain Risk Mitigation; and The "New" Fundamentals of Supply Chain Management: What Matters Now.
A new offering this year is the "Women at Work Panel: Power Up Your Supply Chain Management Career," a fresh and honest perspective on the challenges facing women in today's corporate supply chain environment and how to overcome them. Speakers will discuss how women's roles, relationships, and responsibilities have changed in the field, and the skills women need to transition into leadership positions.
For the first time, CSCMP is offering discounted registration rates to active, retired, and civilian U.S. military personnel. Additionally, 10 percent of the proceeds from military registrations will go to the "Wounded Warrior Project," a program that provides services for and raises awareness of the needs of injured service members.
For more information about CSCMP's Annual Global Conference, click here.
Three new research projects investigate current hot topics
Since its inception, the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals has helped to guide and fund cutting-edge research to advance supply chain management practices. Currently CSCMP has three major research projects under way, with results to be published later this year. They include:
Offshoring Trends and Directions. This research initiative studies trends in offshoring and identifies the criteria currently being used to make offshoring decisions.
Supply Chain Management Talent Development. This research is exploring best practices in supply chain management talent development and retention.
Organizing Supply Chains in a Time of Change. Supply chain management organizations can be organized in a variety of ways, with different reporting arrangements, functional scope, and coordination structures. This research will ascertain whether certain business conditions make some supply chain organizations more effective than others.The three research teams will each provide a preview of their results at the Annual Global Conference in Atlanta.
To make members aware of these and other research efforts, CSCMP has launched a new publication, CSCMP Hot Topics. In two to four pages, Hot Topics highlights new research and insights or revisits older research topics that have reemerged as critical issues. The first issue of CSCMP Hot Topics covers the organization's offshoring research. To learn more about this publication, go to cscmp.org, and under the Member Only menu, select Hot Topics.
CSCMP On-Site Education comes to you!
Professional education of supply chain management talent has become a critical need for companies that want to maximize employee performance. Yet it's hard for employees at all levels to take extended time away from their daily responsibilities. For companies facing this challenge, CSCMP On-Site Education is a cost-efficient and timely solution.
Thanks to its global membership and relationships with educators and leading practitioners worldwide, CSCMP can provide educational workshops and seminars at any company location or facility anywhere in the world. This can significantly reduce or eliminate travel time and costs, create an efficient in-house educational experience, and enhance team building while staff learns together.
Curricula can be created for any type of organization, function, location, market, or industry. Organizations can choose an established CSCMP on-site workshop or develop a program that meets the business needs of an individual enterprise. Established on-site workshops cover change management, fundamentals of supply chain management, global supply chain management, SCM collaboration, relationship management, and strategic issues. Education levels range from introductory to intermediate and advanced.
On-Site Education programs qualify for one SCPro continuing education unit (CEU) per one hour of instruction. (Learn more about CSCMP's SCPro Certification at cscmpcertification.org.)
To discuss how CSCMP can deliver targeted education to your organization, contact Director of Education & Research Kathleen Hedland at khedland@cscmp.org, or call +1 630.645.3463.
CSCMP Explores... looks at humanitarian logistics
The United Nations believes that the global demand for humanitarian assistance will continue to rise. The reasons: escalating conflicts and a dramatic increase in vulnerabilities caused by financial crises, increasing food scarcity and prices, insufficiency of energy and water, and the increased severity of disasters.
Supply chain management plays a critical role in helping governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) address those problems. Accordingly, Humanitarian Relief: Broken Supply Chains and Role of the Private Sector, the latest publication in the CSCMP Explores... series of booklets, investigates how logistics and supply chain professionals can play a role in filling important gaps in the humanitarian supply chain.
Topics in the CSCMP Explores... series focus on practical, real-world information that can inform day-to-day decisions and help prepare readers to handle the uncertainties of today's economy. Issues alternate between in-depth coverage of supply chain topics and case studies that showcase best practices and lessons learned from implementations.
ReposiTrak, a global food traceability network operator, will partner with Upshop, a provider of store operations technology for food retailers, to create an end-to-end grocery traceability solution that reaches from the supply chain to the retail store, the firms said today.
The partnership creates a data connection between suppliers and the retail store. It works by integrating Salt Lake City-based ReposiTrak’s network of thousands of suppliers and their traceability shipment data with Austin, Texas-based Upshop’s network of more than 450 retailers and their retail stores.
That accomplishment is important because it will allow food sector trading partners to meet the U.S. FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act Section 204d (FSMA 204) requirements that they must create and store complete traceability records for certain foods.
And according to ReposiTrak and Upshop, the traceability solution may also unlock potential business benefits. It could do that by creating margin and growth opportunities in stores by connecting supply chain data with store data, thus allowing users to optimize inventory, labor, and customer experience management automation.
"Traceability requires data from the supply chain and – importantly – confirmation at the retail store that the proper and accurate lot code data from each shipment has been captured when the product is received. The missing piece for us has been the supply chain data. ReposiTrak is the leader in capturing and managing supply chain data, starting at the suppliers. Together, we can deliver a single, comprehensive traceability solution," Mark Hawthorne, chief innovation and strategy officer at Upshop, said in a release.
"Once the data is flowing the benefits are compounding. Traceability data can be used to improve food safety, reduce invoice discrepancies, and identify ways to reduce waste and improve efficiencies throughout the store,” Hawthorne said.
Under FSMA 204, retailers are required by law to track Key Data Elements (KDEs) to the store-level for every shipment containing high-risk food items from the Food Traceability List (FTL). ReposiTrak and Upshop say that major industry retailers have made public commitments to traceability, announcing programs that require more traceability data for all food product on a faster timeline. The efforts of those retailers have activated the industry, motivating others to institute traceability programs now, ahead of the FDA’s enforcement deadline of January 20, 2026.
Inclusive procurement practices can fuel economic growth and create jobs worldwide through increased partnerships with small and diverse suppliers, according to a study from the Illinois firm Supplier.io.
The firm’s “2024 Supplier Diversity Economic Impact Report” found that $168 billion spent directly with those suppliers generated a total economic impact of $303 billion. That analysis can help supplier diversity managers and chief procurement officers implement programs that grow diversity spend, improve supply chain competitiveness, and increase brand value, the firm said.
The companies featured in Supplier.io’s report collectively supported more than 710,000 direct jobs and contributed $60 billion in direct wages through their investments in small and diverse suppliers. According to the analysis, those purchases created a ripple effect, supporting over 1.4 million jobs and driving $105 billion in total income when factoring in direct, indirect, and induced economic impacts.
“At Supplier.io, we believe that empowering businesses with advanced supplier intelligence not only enhances their operational resilience but also significantly mitigates risks,” Aylin Basom, CEO of Supplier.io, said in a release. “Our platform provides critical insights that drive efficiency and innovation, enabling companies to find and invest in small and diverse suppliers. This approach helps build stronger, more reliable supply chains.”
Logistics industry growth slowed in December due to a seasonal wind-down of inventory and following one of the busiest holiday shopping seasons on record, according to the latest Logistics Managers’ Index (LMI) report, released this week.
The monthly LMI was 57.3 in December, down more than a percentage point from November’s reading of 58.4. Despite the slowdown, economic activity across the industry continued to expand, as an LMI reading above 50 indicates growth and a reading below 50 indicates contraction.
The LMI researchers said the monthly conditions were largely due to seasonal drawdowns in inventory levels—and the associated costs of holding them—at the retail level. The LMI’s Inventory Levels index registered 50, falling from 56.1 in November. That reduction also affected warehousing capacity, which slowed but remained in expansion mode: The LMI’s warehousing capacity index fell 7 points to a reading of 61.6.
December’s results reflect a continued trend toward more typical industry growth patterns following recent years of volatility—and they point to a successful peak holiday season as well.
“Retailers were clearly correct in their bet to stock [up] on goods ahead of the holiday season,” the LMI researchers wrote in their monthly report. “Holiday sales from November until Christmas Eve were up 3.8% year-over-year according to Mastercard. This was largely driven by a 6.7% increase in e-commerce sales, although in-person spending was up 2.9% as well.”
And those results came during a compressed peak shopping cycle.
“The increase in spending came despite the shorter holiday season due to the late Thanksgiving,” the researchers also wrote, citing National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates that U.S. shoppers spent just short of a trillion dollars in November and December, making it the busiest holiday season of all time.
The LMI is a monthly survey of logistics managers from across the country. It tracks industry growth overall and across eight areas: inventory levels and costs; warehousing capacity, utilization, and prices; and transportation capacity, utilization, and prices. The report is released monthly by researchers from Arizona State University, Colorado State University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, and the University of Nevada, Reno, in conjunction with the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP).
Specifically, the two sides remain at odds over provisions related to the deployment of semi-automated technologies like rail-mounted gantry cranes, according to an analysis by the Kansas-based 3PL Noatum Logistics. The ILA has strongly opposed further automation, arguing it threatens dockworker protections, while the USMX contends that automation enhances productivity and can create long-term opportunities for labor.
In fact, U.S. importers are already taking action to prevent the impact of such a strike, “pulling forward” their container shipments by rushing imports to earlier dates on the calendar, according to analysis by supply chain visibility provider Project44. That strategy can help companies to build enough safety stock to dampen the damage of events like the strike and like the steep tariffs being threatened by the incoming Trump administration.
Likewise, some ocean carriers have already instituted January surcharges in pre-emption of possible labor action, which could support inbound ocean rates if a strike occurs, according to freight market analysts with TD Cowen. In the meantime, the outcome of the new negotiations are seen with “significant uncertainty,” due to the contentious history of the discussion and to the timing of the talks that overlap with a transition between two White House regimes, analysts said.
That percentage is even greater than the 13.21% of total retail sales that were returned. Measured in dollars, returns (including both legitimate and fraudulent) last year reached $685 billion out of the $5.19 trillion in total retail sales.
“It’s clear why retailers want to limit bad actors that exhibit fraudulent and abusive returns behavior, but the reality is that they are finding stricter returns policies are not reducing the returns fraud they face,” Michael Osborne, CEO of Appriss Retail, said in a release.
Specifically, the report lists the leading types of returns fraud and abuse reported by retailers in 2024, including findings that:
60% of retailers surveyed reported incidents of “wardrobing,” or the act of consumers buying an item, using the merchandise, and then returning it.
55% cited cases of returning an item obtained through fraudulent or stolen tender, such as stolen credit cards, counterfeit bills, gift cards obtained through fraudulent means or fraudulent checks.
48% of retailers faced occurrences of returning stolen merchandise.
Together, those statistics show that the problem remains prevalent despite growing efforts by retailers to curb retail returns fraud through stricter returns policies, while still offering a sufficiently open returns policy to keep customers loyal, they said.
“Returns are a significant cost for retailers, and the rise of online shopping could increase this trend,” Kevin Mahoney, managing director, retail, Deloitte Consulting LLP, said. “As retailers implement policies to address this issue, they should avoid negatively affecting customer loyalty and retention. Effective policies should reduce losses for the retailer while minimally impacting the customer experience. This approach can be crucial for long-term success.”