This Week on Supply Chain Now: September 21st – 25th

Back in the day, business news and ideas often flowed from office watercooler conversations. Then company figureheads started popping up on cable TV news programs, lecturing on stock market drops, trade increases, industry gains, and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain shortfalls. Now, podcasts are all the rage, and it can be difficult to stand out in a crowded field. There’s a lot of noise in supply chain podcasts, in particular. How do you break through to share your supply chain insights with potentially millions of listeners? Supply Chain Podcasts: Meeting Industry Leaders Where They Are It’s said that public radio host Christopher Lydon used an audio RSS feed developed by software engineer Dave Winer to provide audio content of interviews on his blog in 2003. A year later, iPodder was created to enable users to download audio content to their iPods, and the word podcast was born. This year, the number of podcast listeners is forecast to reach a whopping 254.3 million. Podcasts have become the place for industry leaders to find an eager audience. Breaking Through: 3 Ways Supply Chain Podcasts Cut Through the Noise Today, there are thousands of podcasts that are touted as supply chain-focused. In…

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…