This Week on Supply Chain Now: April 20-24

Today, podcasts rival streaming television programming in terms of the number and variety of offerings. Perhaps that’s because podcasts are the ideal vehicle for businesses to deliver thought leadership and expand brand visibility. Professionally produced and informative supply chain podcasts provide companies and industry experts a way to engage with targeted audiences and build credibility and trust with customers and business stakeholders. Podcasts Represent a Growing Trend in a Dynamic Media Landscape “Podcasting is no longer a niche medium,” according to Statista, which said nearly 70 million people in the United States listened to podcasts in 2023. The audience for podcasts is expected to continue to grow and is forecast to reach 110 million listeners by 2029. And there’s room for more supply chain-focused businesses to invest in supply chain podcasts to share their messaging and build brand authority. Three Reasons Businesses Invest in Supply Chain Podcasts “Podcasts are often viewed as a relatively easy way for anyone to tell a story. But actually getting an audience for that storytelling is more difficult, and podcast producers use several means to grow and connect with their audiences. Most of the top-ranked podcasts studied are available on four major listing sites –…

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…