The Supply Chainer

A shipment clears manufacturing but stalls at export review. Customs documentation is incomplete. Export-control licensing requirements changed last week, and no one updated the screening checklist. Freight forwarders request additional cer...

A hospital procurement director receives an urgent request for sterile wound dressings following an unexpected surge in emergency admissions. The order arrives within 24 hours, routed automatically through a regional distribution center tha...

A driverless Volvo semi completes its first commercial run on Interstate 35 in Texas. The truck transmits location, speed, and lane position every second. Traffic signals confirm green phases through vehicle-to-infrastructure links. The rou...

The latest roundtable edition of the Resilient Supply Chain Podcast, hosted by Tom Raftery, examines why better visibility does not automatically produce better operational performance. Raftery is joined by Matt Yearling, CEO of YMX Logistics; Chad Fox, Manager and Delivery Lead at Miebach Consulting; and Kurt Neutgens, CEO and co-founder of Orange EV. The discussion focuses on the gap between seeing what is happening across warehouse, yard and transport operations, and havin

A container vessel slows 200 miles from Singapore. The carrier updates its arrival estimate by six hours. The logistics team receives an automated alert, glances at it, and returns to other work. No one adjusts downstream plans. No one call...

Fleet operators are collecting unprecedented volumes of telematics data, yet many still struggle to convert visibility into operational improvements. GPS tracking, fuel monitoring, maintenance alerts, driver behavior analytics, and route intelligence provide a detailed view of fleet performance. The challenge is no longer access to information. It is deciding what to do with it. As fleets face pressure to improve efficiency while controlling costs, operators are balancing com

A demand forecast shifts overnight. A supplier confirms late delivery. Inventory positioning suddenly misaligns with production schedules across three sites. Planning teams lose hours reconciling data, comparing scenarios, and deciding whic...

A container discharge triggers a cascade of decisions across drayage dispatch, warehouse scheduling, and inventory allocation. Each decision depends on data held in separate carrier portals, terminal operating systems, and spreadsheet track...

A procurement lead learns from a news alert that a shared software supplier has been compromised. The vendor is not answering. The contract file shows a security assessment signed off eleven months ago. Nobody in the building can say whether the company is exposed, and nobody can say it is not. That gap between an incident and the moment a downstream buyer understands its own position is where most third-party risk programs quietly fail. The recent Klue breach has put the pro

Battery material recycling is moving from pilot programs to industrial scale as cost reductions and tightening raw material access reshape procurement economics. Manufacturers now face parallel pressure: secure lithium, nickel, and cobalt s...

Warehouse operators are surrounded by data. Every movement, order and inventory transaction is recorded somewhere across warehouse management systems, labor platforms, and automation equipment. Yet one question continues to surface inside distribution centers: can we be certain the system reflects what is happening on the warehouse floor right now? That uncertainty shows up in everyday situations. Inventory appears available but cannot be found, a location marked as full is o

Supply chain leaders have invested heavily in warehouse automation, transportation management systems and control towers over the past decade. Yet many organizations continue to struggle with costly disruptions that originate outside the traditional warehouse environment. According to the MHI annual industry report, visibility and real-time operational data remain among the top priorities for supply chain executives despite years of technology investment. The findings suggest