Category Archive

Shutting a factory. A real life situation – you have a profitable factory established for many years in a low growth mature market – in this case, Australia. You also want to grow your business in fast developing Asia. An option is to shut the established factory, build a new factory in Thailand and supply the mature market from the … Read More

Buying the farm. Demand for food (human), feed (animal) and fuel crops will continue to increase with a growing world population (especially in major cities), industrialisation in developing countries and rising incomes. Additionally, future reductions in the supply of oil will increase demand for plant based plastics and chemicals. Within this framework, Australia is currently experiencing some frantic manoeuvring in … Read More

Supply chains and complexity. The world of trade and business has always been volatile and complex to the people experiencing it at that point in time. Throughout my working life I have read articles that talk about business being fast moving and ever more complex – the commentators were writing about their current knowledge. In the past the complexity in … Read More

Sounds similar but not the same.  Commentators are still confused about eBusiness and eCommerce. The interchange of these terms is common, so it requires effort by logisticians to understand what the articles are actually referring to. eBusiness describes an enterprise that operates only in an on-line environment, although the business may use warehouses and logistics service providers (LSP). The total … Read More

Innovation and productivity. Is your business logistics function innovative. Or are you just getting on with ‘continuous productivity improvements’? That is the problem with what you are achieving and the terminology used. Next month there is a conference in Melbourne with the title Creative Innovation – an attention grabbing heading; but what is innovation? A dictionary definition is ” to … Read More