Company Briefings
A company briefing is a one-on-one conversation with an industry leader, analyst, consultant or vendor about the state of materials and information handling. It's a chance to have a candid conversation about the trends and direction of the marketplace today.
Supply chain: Get ready for Modern's Virtual Conference
I’m not a car guy, but one of my guilty pleasures on Saturday morning is to listen to Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, on public radio in the car while I’m running errands. If you’re a fan like me, you’re familiar with the Shameless Commerce Division, that portion of the show when they hawk their own stuff to a captive audience. Consider this blog Modern’s S ...... Read More
Comments (0)Supply chain software: Warehouse control systems find their place
You know the old saying: caught between a rock and a hard place. That’s sort of where warehouse control systems (WCS) have traditionally found themselves in the supply chain. They sat somewhere between a warehouse management system (WMS) and automated materials handling equipment and systems. For the most part, WMS systems did the heavy lifting when it came to managing inventory, planning w ...... Read More
Comments (0)Supply chain software: Will we soon see an on-demand Tier 1 WMS from RedPrairie?
This week, RedPrairie and NetSuite announced an agreement that represents a potentially interesting development in the world of on-demand, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), solutions for supply chain execution software. I say potentially because, according to my contact at NetSuite, the goal is for RedPrairie to eventually offer a variety of supply chain execution solutions on demand (that&# ...... Read More
Comments (0)Supply chain management: Oracle and E2open partner to turn a product into a solution
I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but every once in a while I notice that I’m hearing the same sort of thing from a couple of vendors, put two and two together, and come up with a trend. Of late, I’ve noticed something I’m calling “from product to solution.” In fact, it’s going to be one of our lead features in the December issue. The tr ...... Read More
Comments (2)Supply chain management: The last mile
When it comes to the supply chain, inventory management stops at the distribution center dock door for most companies. Yes, a retail chain may have an inventory management program to track the inventory inside its stores, but it’s still in a silo. Often, there is a disconnect between the inventory in the store and the inventory in the warehouse. In recent years, a couple of supply ch ...... Read More
Comments (2)Supply chain management: Tough year in the 3PL market, but better days ahead
Every year around this time, Modern publishes a special report on the top 20 public and refrigerated warehouse providers in the country. This year’s report by Lorie Rogers will be one of the highlights of our November issue. Keep an eye out for it. Also around this time, Dr. Robert Lieb, a professor of supply chain management at Boston’s Northeastern University, publishes an a ...... Read More
Comments (0)Automated materials handling: The new untouchables
I read a column titled The New Untouchables by Tom Friedman in the New York Times the other day. It made me think about what’s next for the materials handling industry. The short-term outlook for our industry is tough. At the Material Handling Industry fall meetings in Amelia Island two weeks ago, MHIA predicted a continued slowdown through the first half of 2010. Anyone counting on ...... Read More
Comments (0)RFID: Catching up with Mike Dempsey
Last week, I ran into Mike Dempsey at the MHIA fall meetings in Amelia Island, Fla. I’ve been talking to Dempsey about trends in technology, especially warehouse management systems and RFID, since the late 1990’s. At Modern, were talking to Dempsey about using RFID for asset management way back in 2005, a time when most people were still focused on tagging cases and pallets in the re ...... Read More
Comments (0)The economy: Sales are down and the Dow is up
At lunch today, I turned on CNBC as the Dow briefly passed 10,000. It occurred to me that the economy is giving off more mixed signals these days than an evening of speed dating. Example: Today’s optimism was driven by a better than expected decline in retail sales in September. That’s right: Retail sales went down and the Dow went up. What happened is that analysts got ...... Read More
Comments (4)Green Supply Chain: Making the case for wooden pallets.
Last week, I wrote about how the lowly caster was playing a starring role in lean manufacturing at KIA’s new assembly plant in West Point, Ga. Today, Michael Smith, the COO of PALNET, a supplier of wooden pallets, made an equally bold assertion about another product you don’t give much thought to: Wooden pallets, Smith said, are eco-friendly and can enable a green supply chain ...... Read More
Comments (0)Lean manufacturing: Want to get lean? Think casters.
When you think of lean manufacturing, you probably don’t think about casters. Heck, if you’re like me, you probably don’t think about casters at all. But a press release about the new KIA Motors automotive assembly plant in West Point, Ga. had me looking at casters in a new light. The plant is a marvel of materials handling automation and lean manufacturing principles. ...... Read More
Comments (0)Materials handling automation: Behind the Diamond Phoenix/System Logistics merger
Last week, Diamond Phoenix announced that it had been acquired by Systems Logistics, the logistics division of System Group S.p.A., a $500 million a year industrial trading company based in Modena, Italy. Tom Coyne, Diamond Phoenix’s CEO, was at a trade show in Europe last week, but on Friday, I caught up with Coyne by phone to find out a little bit more about Systems Logistics and w ...... Read More
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