Shelby Foam Systems, which supplies padding and Velcro to one of the world's largest seating manufacturers for cars and trucks, wasn't sitting comfortably with its transportation provider. It needed better inbound monitoring, and at a lower cost.
With a current world population of more than seven billion, and expectations that number will exceed eight billion by 2030, the global healthcare industry is growing exponentially. But to achieve its potential, providers across the industry - from R+D and manufacturing to the caregivers themselves - must go "borderless." This interconnected view of the industry's future was the focus of the FedEx Corp. healthcare industry summit, held in New York City recently.
These clusters are agglomerations of logistics activities in a region or logistics park, and there can be huge cost-saving advantages to locating in them.
Robert Gifford, executive vice president of global logistics with Ingram Micro, walks us through the past, present and future of global supply chains. He also discusses how his own company is positioning itself to cope with change.
How France's Sofrigam SA came to trust an outside logistics provider, ModusLink, to provide fulfillment and warehousing duties for its highly sensitive line of products for protecting temperature-controlled bio-pharmaceutical shipments.
More than 40 percent of companies that outsource intend to conduct a bid or rebid for part of their network to a logistics service provider within the next 12 months, according to the Outsourced Distribution Report by Tompkins Supply Chain Consortium.