On August 7, Yellow Corporation declared bankruptcy. This was a sad day, marking the end of an era. Yellow, which was founded nearly 100 years ago, grew to become one of the world’s largest trucking companies. Even on the day of its Chapter 11 filing, Yellow was the third-largest less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier in the United […]

Last year, several University of Florida Supply Chain Management Center Advisory Board members came to the BGSA Supply Chain Conference. This year was different. COVID-19 caused our 15th annual conference to go virtual. Nevertheless, the silver lining was that we had the opportunity to include an even broader-reaching mix of supply chain leaders, including speakers […]

COVID-19 first appeared in Wuhan China in December 2019 – causing disruptions to trade which linger today. Besides the direct impacts of city shutdowns and quarantines which have impacted Chinese worker availability, the ongoing pandemic has affected everything from; the availability and prices of shipping containers; cardboard; and manufacturing capacity which shifted to essential PPE […]

The current COVID-19 Vaccine US Supply Chain can be separated into two segments, each within the control of distinct decision makers. A schematic representation of the supply chain controlled by the Federal government is: The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services also has a helpful chart to visualize the process. In order to allocate [...]

Last week, we hosted the 15th annual BGSA Supply Chain conference. Despite the shift to a virtual format, we had a vibrant discussion with more than 30 CEOs and industry leaders, including Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel, US Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, and the heads of Echo, GlobalTranz, Agility Logistics and many others. For those that […]

I reached out to the Board of Advisors (and other corporate connections) of the SCM Center to share their experiences during the last couple of months. As you will observe, we can learn a lot from such shared experiences from multi-dimensional perspectives. Insights into the status of consumer product, education, grocery store, health-care, and transportation [...]

The healthcare logistics market is booming. On July 15, healthcare logistics powerhouse Marken announced three acquisitions. Austria-based HETO, Hungary-based Der Kurier, and Italy-based HRTL all agreed to sell. Marken, in turn, was previously acquired by UPS, in an effort to create a life sciences supply chain leader. The resulting company will cover 51 locations, 10 […]

The term Internet-of-Things (IoT), coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999, highlighted the linkage between RFID tags and a central information repository using the internet. The key idea was that using such machine-to-machine connectivity (M2M), locational data access would optimize supply chain operations. Although the evolution of IoT is rooted in M2M connectivity (i.e., connecting a [...]