MHI Blog -- According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics November 6th national jobs report, Warehousing and storage companies added 5,100 jobs over the last month. Overall warehousing and storage businesses have added 18,200 jobs since June, and 46,100 jobs over the past 12 months.

The Wall Street Journal reports that this is the strongest employment growth in the sector since July and a sign of the growing impact of e-commerce in logistics hiring.

BloombergBusiness -- Tired of waiting for Congress, states racing to deepen seaports before the opening of the enlarged Panama Canal next year are picking up the cost of what has traditionally been a federal duty.

With funding for coastal navigation channels at its lowest in a decade, port directors worry that the federal government is abandoning construction and maintenance of U.S. waterways just as builders churn out a new generation of massive container vessels. The so-called post-Panamax class carries loads twice the size of current ships and demand ever-deeper harbors.

The Hill -- The House approved a bill to spend up to $325 billion on transportation projects on Thursday after a weeklong vote-a-rama and an intense debate about federal gas taxes.

The measure also includes a reauthorization of the controversial Export-Import Bank's charter, which has been held up in Congress since it expired in June.  The extension, which was included in the Senate's highway bill and left unchanged by the House, reauthorizes the bank's expired charter until 2019.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette -- Around 8 a.m. at a cavernous warehouse in Butler County recently, about four dozen delivery drivers for United Parcel Service got their first look at the scheduled drop-offs for the day.

Prepping for roughly 9-hour shifts with anywhere from 50 to 150 stops, it could have been — and, until recently, was — a daunting start, as drivers had to calculate how best to juggle the day’s load while negotiating Pittsburgh-area traffic snarls such as bridges, tunnels and sudden road closures.

But as the drivers did their stretches and huddled for a morning pep talk, they stopped to consult a computer screen. It told them precisely what route to take to make each delivery and what time they would get there.

Modern Materials Handling -- "Our DC gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace and is considered a strategic asset," says Chris Halkyard, former chief supply chain officer for the Gilt Groupe.

If you’ve spent any time in distribution centers lately, you know a fundamental shift is underway in how DCs are designed and the purposes they serve. In the not-so-distant past, a DC was a cost of doing business and a necessary evil. For the most part, they were places to store inventory until it was shipped on to the next stop along the way. Success for DC managers was measured by how much they could reduce the cost of handling a pallet or carton.

Industry Week -- San Antonio saw the biggest growth in millennial population of any U.S. city in 2014. And from 2000-2013 the population grew 30%.

Why San Antonio? Maybe it’s the strong job market. The Brookings Institution, in 2014, named San Antonio one of the strongest-performing economies among the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the nation and #1 in overall performance based on employment and unemployment levels.

As part of MHI view's ongoing video program, this new episode focuses on: RFID Tags

Todd Farewell, Innovation Architect and Global Deployment Champion for Caterpillar Inc., discusses RFID tags and the potential they have for revealing insight into your supply chain.

 

 

 

The Hill -- Digital rights advocates are mobilizing against a sweeping Asia-Pacific trade deal.

The White House says the pact will be a valuable tool to combat cyber theft, but critics say it could actually hamper cybersecurity and erode critical privacy protections worldwide.

MHI Blog -- Introverts and Leadership. At face value, these appear to be two distinct characteristics that do not complement each other. When one hears the word introvert, terms like shy or reserved come to mind, and while these may be overarching generalizations of the trait, introversion is generally not something we equate to leadership.

To be successful in today’s extroverted business culture, the thought that effective leaders have to be outgoing and outspoken isn’t necessarily true. Perhaps quite the opposite, in fact. In a recent report, nearly 40% of executives surveyed identified themselves as introverts, including some of the world’s most successful executives – names like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Charles Schwab. Below are five key characteristics that play to introverts’ favor in becoming a successful leader.

The Washington Post -- The future of delivery might involve small drones zooming above pedestrians, cyclists and motorists at high speeds. Amazon and now Wal-Mart are moving down this path. Or it might be something a lot slower  that travels on sidewalks.

On Monday, a London startup founded by two Skype co-founders unveiled their self-driving delivery robot. It bumbles along at a whopping 4 mph.

Logistics Viewpoints -- Over the last few months, I’ve done extensive research on omni-channel fulfillment processes and technologies. One of the findings from my study was that one of the biggest questions retailers face when they move to an omni-channel initiative is where to start? With the continued growth in online shopping, retailers are trying to figure out how best to fulfill e-commerce orders. From my recent survey, distribution centers are the most common method for fulfilling e-commerce orders – 63% percent use a traditional DC and 46% use a web-only DC (respondents could choose more than one option). The third most popular method is to fulfill from the store (43%). There are two main options for store fulfillment: in-store pick-up and ship from store.

Logistics Viewpoints -- Warehouses and distribution centers are undergoing a quiet revolution in the adoption of advanced technologies. The warehouse is on the trajectory to implement many of the capabilities sought in the vision of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). eCommerce is has been a driver in this sector as companies such as Amazon, Walgreens, and LL Bean are seeking out solutions that are robust, high speed, and have little labor content.

The margin pressure in the retail sector is placing incredible demands on operations to reduce labor content, increase production output, and reduce warehousing space. Innovations abound in the warehouse today with the wide use of automated and semi-automated systems used to track, retrieve and store goods.

EBN -- The world economy continues to sputter along, but the news is not all bad—the slowdown is making it cheaper to ship goods by sea.

As a result, electronic OEMs and other players are paying only a small percentage of what they would have previously paid before the downturn.

According to analyst firm Karatzas Marine Advisors, the average pre-downturn pricing to ship a container from China to Europe, for example, was $1,500 to $2,000 dollars per container, compared to $500 per container today. Shipping prices from China and Asia to North America have fallen by similar magnitudes of scale.

Industry Week -- Virtual reality technology has been around for decades in a variety of research applications. Virtual reality (VR) originally became commercially popularized through video games and movie media, but has since evolved for use in major urban development projects, to the point where it is being applied to manufacturing, retail, distribution, installation and healthcare supply chain operations.

Apparel -- With a quarter of holiday shoppers planning to spend more this year than last, retailers can start to celebrate. In its second year of research into holiday shopping plans, analytics company SAS, polled 3,458 consumers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. The U.S. led spending growth with 29 percent of consumers saying they'll spend more. Canadian shoppers, on the other hand, are tightening their budgets this year. Millennial shoppers (ages 18-29) are most likely to up their spending this year, while older consumers are tending to stick with last year's budget.

GlobeSt.com -- KC Conway believes there is a transformation under way of North America’s industrial supply chain. Global changes in trade patterns are driving business to East Coast ports, and it has little to do with the Panama Canal expansion.

Conway is the locally based senior vice president, credit risk manager and chief valuation officer with SunTrust Bank. His observations came during a session at RealShare Industrial 2015,held here on Wednesday. He said that while the West Coast ports will still be huge, there is definite eastward momentum.