Kelly Barner

Another great week here at Supply Chain Now! Have you listened to all the episodes? If not, you can check them all out here: On Monday, Scott and Greg welcomed Mark Messina & Simon Houghton of Geek+ to the podcast!     Scott and Greg also welcomed Mike Griswold from Gartner to SCN Live to talk about all the latest supply chain news.     On Tuesday, Scott and Greg welcome Allison Krache Giddens of Win-Tech, Inc. to the podcast in collaboration with AIAG’s Supply Chain Summit.     Michael Neme joined host Jamin Alvidrez on Logistics & Beyond on Tuesday as well to share his mindset and some of the keys to his passion: Supply Chain Consultative Sales.     On Wednesday, Scott and Greg welcomed Karin Bursa and Jamin Alvidrez for the Supply Chain Buzz, to discuss the top news in supply chain for the week.     Also, Scott and Greg discussed the top news in supply chain with special guest, Guy Courtin of 6 River Systems     On TECHquila Sunrise this Thursday, Greg White welcomed Kinaxis CEO John Sicard to the podcast.     And on Friday, we ended the week with Scott & Greg…

Prospects of supply chain automation have the industry abuzz. It’s even become a major sticking point in the International Longshoremen’s Association contract negotiations with the United States Maritime Alliance. The dockworkers do not want ports to automate processes out of fear they will lose their jobs to machines. Today, there are seemingly endless possibilities for optimization. Terms like generative artificial intelligence and machine learning have become commonplace in discussions about ways to gain efficiencies and reduce costs. Can man and machine work together as businesses leverage automation for optimization? Beyond the Buzz: Understanding the Automation Imperative Machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), is described by Business News Daily as a later-stage development in which machines take in data on their own and then analyze it. Automation, on the other hand, is fixed on repetitive tasks; after a job is performed, an automation system “thinks no further.” The Business News Daily article explained that “automation involves an entire category of technologies that provide activity or work without human involvement,” while AI involves “a machine exhibiting and practicing something similar to what we describe as human thinking – that is, the ability to interact in thousands of ways with the…