Across industries, we have left the big buildings, facilities and industrial parks and gone remote. All those remote operations, dispersed businesses and mobile and autonomous equipment need to be serviced. Thus, the service provider has to go to those remote locales. However, just as their customers have changed, the business of service has also changed. The service provider can also leverage technology to monitor, diagnose, and sometimes repair remotely.

"An army marches on its stomach," Napoleon famously said. While the high-technology sector captures the headlines, the supply chain sector is responsible for the heavy lifting, behind the scenes. The books, clothing, and goods that we purchase are increasingly made in Asia or Mexico; transported through multiple modes including air, ocean, rail and truck; passed through warehouses or cross-dock facilities; and delivered to your home via a last-mile delivery company.

Roughly seven months into the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports slowdown with, unfortunately, no end in sight, and manufacturers in just about every industry, from electronics to home goods, are feeling the pain.

SupplyChainBrain and JobsInLogistics have joined forces in 2015 for the specialized purpose of:

With the Jan. 1 U.S. Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) lot-level traceability deadline now behind us, many pharmaceutical companies are turning their attention to full drug serialization. DSCSA requires that manufacturers mark packages with a product identifier, serial number, lot number, and expiration date by 2017. In that period, highly regulated packaging and distribution processes must be changed; physical equipment must be procured and operationalized; enterprise-wide IT must be implemented; and end-to-end serialization testing with supply chain partners must take place well in advance of the deadline to allow time for any necessary adjustments. Given these multi-faceted complexities, three years is an aggressive implementation time frame.

The labor shortage in the supply chain and manufacturing industries has been well-documented, and increasingly so as that shortage continues to grow. Female executives at logistics services providers can't stress enough how they'd like to see more women continue to enter the supply chain workforce and break the stereotype of it being "a man’s world."

For more than 50 years, global production of plastic has continued to rise. Some 299 million tons of plastics were produced in 2013, representing a 4 percent increase over 2012. Recovery and recycling, however, remain insufficient, and millions of tons of plastics end up in landfills and oceans each year, according to Gaelle Gourmelon, communications and marketing manager at the Worldwatch Institute.