On-Demand Labor Can Fill Your Workforce Shortage
The Real Reason Warehouses Can’t Solve the Shift Problem Everybody in distribution and manufacturing knows the workforce shortage numbers. Seventy-four percent of employers in transport, logistics and automotive report talent shortages, according to Manpower....
Manufacturers Turn to Fractional Executive Leadership
The Gig Economy Has Climbed the Org Chart – and Manufacturers Are Paying Attention Three years ago, I wrote about the growing trend of fractional executive leadership. I called them third-party fractional executives – 3FEs for short. At the time, a lot of people still...
Reindustrialization of U.S. Manufacturing? Wrong Word
The Right Word Is Renaissance – Something the World Has Never Seen Would you call the iPhone a better rotary phone? Then why are people talking about the reindustrialization of U.S. manufacturing? Reindustrialization is the wrong word. And the words we choose shape...
EBITDA Leakage Often Hides in Procurement
How Companies and Private Equity Firms Can Uncover Hidden Value Fast EBITDA rarely erodes all at once. Instead, margin erosion often begins quietly inside procurement: fragmented suppliers, inconsistent pricing, unmanaged contracts, weak purchasing discipline and...
Data Integration Challenges Weaken Business Intelligence
Without Unified Data, AI and Analytics Produce Noise, Not Decisions Key Takeaways Data integration challenges slow decisions and distort insight. Fragmented systems prevent a true single source of truth. AI models fed bad or incomplete data amplify the problem....
Intralogistics Is Where Your Supply Chain Performs – or Not
What Happens Inside Your Facility Drives Everything That Follows Supply chain leaders focus so much on what happens beyond the warehouse that they often overlook intralogistics – what happens inside your four walls. And I get it. Disruptions halfway around the world...
Many Won’t Recover a Dime from IEEPA Tariffs
The Supreme Court Ruled Them Illegal – Companies Still Must Beat Deadlines The Supreme Court just erased $170 billion in IEEPA tariffs. Some companies won’t get a dollar back. The ruling created one of the largest recovery opportunities in recent trade history. More...
Part III: Rip Van Supply Chain Wakes Up to New Execution Models
What You See Now on the Floor and at Industry Shows Rip Van Supply Chain has seen the world and the systems change. Now he’s walking the floor – and operating inside new execution models. For me, that’s not just an analogy. I spent 45 years inside supply chain...
Part II: Systems Changed While Rip Van Supply Chain Slept
From Planning to Execution, the Model Has Shifted When we last left Rip Van Supply Chain, he had woken up to a completely different world. Disruption became the environment. Globalization gave way to ReGlobalization. Now, in the second of this three-part series, Rip...
Part 1: Rip Van Supply Chain Disruption Missed the Shift
He Went to Sleep in One World and Woke Up in Another In Washington Irving’s classic American short story, Rip Van Winkle fell asleep and missed a revolution. Our world of supply chain disruption tells a similar tale. Let’s call that version Rip Van Supply Chain...