Transportation TIP List: Week of January 17th, 2016

Transportation TIP List: Week of January 17th, 2016

While most of the country is enduring some seriously cold temperatures, we’re seeing many of the current trends in the supply chain and transportation industries heating up. Some of the hottest stories this week include new growth in the global flexible packaging market, harnessing technology for omni-channel strategy and improvement around trucking safety. Dive into all the details below!

• A Ten Year Strategic Outlook for the Global Flexible Plastic Packaging Market: Despite the recent global economic slowdown, the growth in flexible plastic packaging demand has still been relatively higher than some of its competing materials. This growth has been supported by a shift from rigid to flexible plastic packaging market.

• Industry Data Shows Improvement in Trucking Safety: The rate of fatal crashes involving heavy-duty trucks is continuing to decline. The truck-involved fatality rate fell to 1.40 incidents per 100 million miles traveled in 2014, the second straight year of decreases

• Logistics and Supply Chain Trends to Monitor in 2016: Writing about trends is tough, and ideally a prediction should be specific enough and testable enough that someone can look back and see whether it was right or wrong. With these thoughts in mind, ARC attempted to make some pertinent and testable predictions for 2016.

• Improving on Strategic Sourcing: These days, sourcing has become a common discipline in supply chain and transportation management. However, meeting these expectations while maintaining service year-over-year has become more challenging.

• American Manufacturing is Not in a Recession: The ISM Manufacturing index has been below 50 for two straight quarters, signaling a recession. This has led economists to call doom and gloom on the sector, but all of this noise is much ado about nothing.

• Use Modeling Technology to Design and Test Omni-Channel Strategy: Redesigning overall retail strategy through the eyes of the consumer with a seamless shopping experience at the core, necessitates an ‘outside-in’ supply chain perspective and often big adjustments to supply chain operations.

• 2016: The Year of Connectivity: New technology has made today’s world a much more connected place. From the Internet to smartphones to social media and Skype to CNN, we can be constantly connected to what is happening in the world, in our business life and in our personal life. So why are our supply chains so disconnected?

What are the hot trends on your TIP list this week?