Global Logistics Blog

Believing business forecast for your company. This week I read of a company supplying materials into the American building and construction industry which has severely overestimated the strength and speed of the national recovery in building activity. The CEO forecast and the Board accepted that US housing starts would rise by between 15 and 18 percent against the previous year’s … Read More

Forecasting helps you to be less wrong. In our personal lives we would be reluctant to identify what we will be doing in three month’s time, over the period of a week. Yet, we are quite willing to identify a single point figure as the sales for an item over that same week in three month’s time. Why is it … Read More

Trucks are worth money to your business. Transport can represent the single largest component of materials movement costs within your supply chains. Many businesses have outsourced all their transport operations, with the danger of a ‘set and forget’ attitude, where all they need to do is negotiate lower priced contracts. But if transport is a high cost element in your … Read More

The culture of your business and accepting responsibility. In your organisation, do managers make (and continue to own) decisions, or do tough challenges go through committees? This week the culture of General Motors has been discussed at the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee in Washington. This hearing is in reference to safety problems with a component used in vehicles; a … Read More

Using less resources in your business. Reducing the amount and value of non-renewable resources through your supply chains will be the coming challenge for management and will require the skills and knowledge of procurement and logistics professionals. For more than a century, until the early 2000’s, the price of hard commodities (except oil) and energy had trended down, but since … Read More