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.
Just 29% of supply chain organizations have the competitive characteristics they’ll need for future readiness, according to a Gartner survey released Tuesday. The survey focused on how organizations are preparing for future challenges and to keep their supply chains competitive.
Gartner surveyed 579 supply chain practitioners to determine the capabilities needed to manage the “future drivers of influence” on supply chains, which include artificial intelligence (AI) achievement and the ability to navigate new trade policies. According to the survey, the five competitive characteristics are: agility, resilience, regionalization, integrated ecosystems, and integrated enterprise strategy.
The survey analysis identified “leaders” among the respondents as supply chain organizations that have already developed at least three of the five competitive characteristics necessary to address the top five drivers of supply chain’s future.
Less than a third have met that threshold.
“Leaders shared a commitment to preparation through long-term, deliberate strategies, while non-leaders were more often focused on short-term priorities,” Pierfrancesco Manenti, vice president analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice, said in a statement announcing the survey results.
“Most leaders have yet to invest in the most advanced technologies (e.g. real-time visibility, digital supply chain twin), but plan to do so in the next three-to-five years,” Manenti also said in the statement. “Leaders see technology as an enabler to their overall business strategies, while non-leaders more often invest in technology first, without having fully established their foundational capabilities.”
As part of the survey, respondents were asked to identify the future drivers of influence on supply chain performance over the next three to five years. The top five drivers are: achievement capability of AI (74%); the amount of new ESG regulations and trade policies being released (67%); geopolitical fight/transition for power (65%); control over data (62%); and talent scarcity (59%).
The analysis also identified four unique profiles of supply chain organizations, based on what their leaders deem as the most crucial capabilities for empowering their organizations over the next three to five years.
First, 54% of retailers are looking for ways to increase their financial recovery from returns. That’s because the cost to return a purchase averages 27% of the purchase price, which erases as much as 50% of the sales margin. But consumers have their own interests in mind: 76% of shoppers admit they’ve embellished or exaggerated the return reason to avoid a fee, a 39% increase from 2023 to 204.
Second, return experiences matter to consumers. A whopping 80% of shoppers stopped shopping at a retailer because of changes to the return policy—a 34% increase YoY.
Third, returns fraud and abuse is top-of-mind-for retailers, with wardrobing rising 38% in 2024. In fact, over two thirds (69%) of shoppers admit to wardrobing, which is the practice of buying an item for a specific reason or event and returning it after use. Shoppers also practice bracketing, or purchasing an item in a variety of colors or sizes and then returning all the unwanted options.
Fourth, returns come with a steep cost in terms of sustainability, with returns amounting to 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste in 2023 alone.
“As returns have become an integral part of the shopper experience, retailers must balance meeting sky-high expectations with rising costs, environmental impact, and fraudulent behaviors,” Amena Ali, CEO of Optoro, said in the firm’s “2024 Returns Unwrapped” report. “By understanding shoppers’ behaviors and preferences around returns, retailers can create returns experiences that embrace their needs while driving deeper loyalty and protecting their bottom line.”
Facing an evolving supply chain landscape in 2025, companies are being forced to rethink their distribution strategies to cope with challenges like rising cost pressures, persistent labor shortages, and the complexities of managing SKU proliferation.
1. Optimize labor productivity and costs. Forward-thinking businesses are leveraging technology to get more done with fewer resources through approaches like slotting optimization, automation and robotics, and inventory visibility.
2. Maximize capacity with smart solutions. With e-commerce volumes rising, facilities need to handle more SKUs and orders without expanding their physical footprint. That can be achieved through high-density storage and dynamic throughput.
3. Streamline returns management. Returns are a growing challenge, thanks to the continued growth of e-commerce and the consumer practice of bracketing. Businesses can handle that with smarter reverse logistics processes like automated returns processing and reverse logistics visibility.
4. Accelerate order fulfillment with robotics. Robotic solutions are transforming the way orders are fulfilled, helping businesses meet customer expectations faster and more accurately than ever before by using autonomous mobile robots (AMRs and robotic picking.
5. Enhance end-of-line packaging. The final step in the supply chain is often the most visible to customers. So optimizing packaging processes can reduce costs, improve efficiency, and support sustainability goals through automated packaging systems and sustainability initiatives.
That clash has come as retailers have been hustling to adjust to pandemic swings like a renewed focus on e-commerce, then swiftly reimagining store experiences as foot traffic returned. But even as the dust settles from those changes, retailers are now facing renewed questions about how best to define their omnichannel strategy in a world where customers have increasing power and information.
The answer may come from a five-part strategy using integrated components to fortify omnichannel retail, EY said. The approach can unlock value and customer trust through great experiences, but only when implemented cohesively, not individually, EY warns.
The steps include:
1. Functional integration: Is your operating model and data infrastructure siloed between e-commerce and physical stores, or have you developed a cohesive unit centered around delivering seamless customer experience?
2. Customer insights: With consumer centricity at the heart of operations, are you analyzing all touch points to build a holistic view of preferences, behaviors, and buying patterns?
3. Next-generation inventory: Given the right customer insights, how are you utilizing advanced analytics to ensure inventory is optimized to meet demand precisely where and when it’s needed?
4. Distribution partnerships: Having ensured your customers find what they want where they want it, how are your distribution strategies adapting to deliver these choices to them swiftly and efficiently?
5. Real estate strategy: How is your real estate strategy interconnected with insights, inventory and distribution to enhance experience and maximize your footprint?
When approached cohesively, these efforts all build toward one overarching differentiator for retailers: a better customer experience that reaches from brand engagement and order placement through delivery and return, the EY study said. Amid continued volatility and an economy driven by complex customer demands, the retailers best set up to win are those that are striving to gain real-time visibility into stock levels, offer flexible fulfillment options and modernize merchandising through personalized and dynamic customer experiences.
Geopolitical rivalries, alliances, and aspirations are rewiring the global economy—and the imposition of new tariffs on foreign imports by the U.S. will accelerate that process, according to an analysis by Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
Without a broad increase in tariffs, world trade in goods will keep growing at an average of 2.9% annually for the next eight years, the firm forecasts in its report, “Great Powers, Geopolitics, and the Future of Trade.” But the routes goods travel will change markedly as North America reduces its dependence on China and China builds up its links with the Global South, which is cementing its power in the global trade map.
“Global trade is set to top $29 trillion by 2033, but the routes these goods will travel is changing at a remarkable pace,” Aparna Bharadwaj, managing director and partner at BCG, said in a release. “Trade lanes were already shifting from historical patterns and looming US tariffs will accelerate this. Navigating these new dynamics will be critical for any global business.”
To understand those changes, BCG modeled the direct impact of the 60/25/20 scenario (60% tariff on Chinese goods, a 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico, and a 20% on imports from all other countries). The results show that the tariffs would add $640 billion to the cost of importing goods from the top ten U.S. import nations, based on 2023 levels, unless alternative sources or suppliers are found.
In terms of product categories imported by the U.S., the greatest impact would be on imported auto parts and automotive vehicles, which would primarily affect trade with Mexico, the EU, and Japan. Consumer electronics, electrical machinery, and fashion goods would be most affected by higher tariffs on Chinese goods. Specifically, the report forecasts that a 60% tariff rate would add $61 billion to cost of importing consumer electronics products from China into the U.S.