The technology giant strengthens its supply chain talent pool by focusing on geographic, cognitive, skill, and generational diversity; its unusual approach to leadership development has created a deep bench of internationally savvy managers.
Contributing Editor Toby Gooley is a freelance writer and editor specializing in supply chain, logistics, material handling, and international trade. She previously was Editor at CSCMP's Supply Chain Quarterly. and Senior Editor of SCQ's sister publication, DC VELOCITY. Prior to joining AGiLE Business Media in 2007, she spent 20 years at Logistics Management magazine as Managing Editor and Senior Editor covering international trade and transportation. Prior to that she was an export traffic manager for 10 years. She holds a B.A. in Asian Studies from Cornell University.
Lenovo, best-known for its laptops, also makes and sells desktop and tablet computers, smartphones, and servers. Because the company serves customers in 160 countries, its supply chain organization values a diverse, international workforce.
Supply chain executives in North America who are faced with human resource challenges can take heart: they are far from alone. According to Nicole Jefferies, executive director, worldwide fulfillment for the technology giant Lenovo, the supply chain talent shortage and its attendant difficulties in recruiting, developing, and retaining supply chain professionals is a global phenomenon. "It's a very competitive talent marketplace everywhere we do business," she said in a presentation at the Gartner Supply Chain Management Executive Conference, held in late May in Phoenix, Arizona. That is saying something: Lenovo, which provides computers, smartphones, and servers, has customers in more than 160 countries, and employs more than 55,000 people.
As a truly global business—the company even has two headquarters, one in the U.S. and one in China—Lenovo seeks to capture the business benefits of its employees' diversity while minimizing barriers like language. That approach gives the company "access to innovation and thought leadership globally," not just at corporate headquarters, Jefferies said.
The company values other types of diversity beyond geography, she added. One is generational: About 8 percent of Lenovo's employees are baby boomers born between 1946 and 1960; 32 percent are Generation X, born between 1961 and 1980; and 61 percent are millennials born after 1980. Like the talent shortage, intergenerational conflict seems to be a nearly universal problem. Jefferies related a recent conversation with a Brazilian plant manager, who contended that millennials were his "biggest problem." In her view, managers' attitudes are the problem; they don't understand how to relate to and get the best out of their younger employees, she said. Jefferies offered some recommendations:
Millennials are easily bored. They like to multitask and are more productive when they have a lot of projects and variety in their work.
Adjusting the standard 9-to-5 workday to accommodate millennials' desire for flexibility makes a big difference in their job satisfaction and their level of engagement.
They will play by the rules, but only if you define those rules and clearly communicate specific expectations.
Lenovo also values and pursues cognitive, skill, and functional diversity in its global supply chain workforce. Thirty percent of supply chain employees are engineers, valued for their ability to solve problems, analyze supply chain networks, and manage automation. Fourteen percent focus on customer experience; their performance is measured based on customer satisfaction, Jefferies said. The remaining 56 percent fall under the foundational "plan-source-make-deliver" functions.
Talent development occurs through a combination of formal learning, learning through relationships, and "learning by doing." For example, employees may take a class in lean manufacturing processes in the morning and then put what they learned into practice in the afternoon. This lets them get experience immediately, rather than waiting until after a months-long program has ended, Jefferies said.
Lenovo's supply chain organization uses techniques like pairing an experienced employee with a newer one who has "a beginner's mind," a Zen Buddhism term for someone who is completely fresh to an idea or situation and thus has no preconceived notions. Both can learn from and spark ideas in each other, Jefferies explained. Another is a "mentoring circle," a group of about 10 people with similar functional responsibilities and skills. They meet regularly to share ideas, concerns, and advice with each other, an approach that builds a supportive peer group and "allows you to scale up one-on-one mentoring," as opposed to the time-consuming responsibilities of individual coaching, she said.
To develop managers and executives who are comfortable with the global nature of Lenovo's business, the company developed a mid-career rotation program that sends candidates to work in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. "This program helps [participants] to learn how to manage teams everywhere, not just in their home countries," Jefferies said. For such international programs to succeed, she added, companies must pay special attention to how the program is structured and candidates are selected. Lenovo sends its managers overseas with specific objectives for building relationships and gaining expertise. To help ensure a successful experience, participants are paired with a local mentor in each location. Assignments last eight to 10 weeks—"long enough that they will be viewed as colleagues and learn a lot, but not so long that it's disruptive to the individual and the local organization," Jefferies said.
A separate program is targeted to managers with executive potential who are already experts in their particular field. Launched seven years ago, the program sends high-potential employees on a trip together; as they travel, they work on building leadership skills, problem solving ability, empathy, and a network of peers. According to Jefferies—a member of the inaugural group—the program has been effective in identifying strong executive candidates and in improving retention. Currently about 40 percent of program graduates are Lenovo executives, according to Jefferies.
Benefits for Amazon's customers--who include marketplace retailers and logistics services customers, as well as companies who use its Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform and the e-commerce shoppers who buy goods on the website--will include generative AI (Gen AI) solutions that offer real-world value, the company said.
The launch is based on “Amazon Nova,” the company’s new generation of foundation models, the company said in a blog post. Data scientists use foundation models (FMs) to develop machine learning (ML) platforms more quickly than starting from scratch, allowing them to create artificial intelligence applications capable of performing a wide variety of general tasks, since they were trained on a broad spectrum of generalized data, Amazon says.
The new models are integrated with Amazon Bedrock, a managed service that makes FMs from AI companies and Amazon available for use through a single API. Using Amazon Bedrock, customers can experiment with and evaluate Amazon Nova models, as well as other FMs, to determine the best model for an application.
Calling the launch “the next step in our AI journey,” the company says Amazon Nova has the ability to process text, image, and video as prompts, so customers can use Amazon Nova-powered generative AI applications to understand videos, charts, and documents, or to generate videos and other multimedia content.
“Inside Amazon, we have about 1,000 Gen AI applications in motion, and we’ve had a bird’s-eye view of what application builders are still grappling with,” Rohit Prasad, SVP of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence, said in a release. “Our new Amazon Nova models are intended to help with these challenges for internal and external builders, and provide compelling intelligence and content generation while also delivering meaningful progress on latency, cost-effectiveness, customization, information grounding, and agentic capabilities.”
The new Amazon Nova models available in Amazon Bedrock include:
Amazon Nova Micro, a text-only model that delivers the lowest latency responses at very low cost.
Amazon Nova Lite, a very low-cost multimodal model that is lightning fast for processing image, video, and text inputs.
Amazon Nova Pro, a highly capable multimodal model with the best combination of accuracy, speed, and cost for a wide range of tasks.
Amazon Nova Premier, the most capable of Amazon’s multimodal models for complex reasoning tasks and for use as the best teacher for distilling custom models
Amazon Nova Canvas, a state-of-the-art image generation model.
Amazon Nova Reel, a state-of-the-art video generation model that can transform a single image input into a brief video with the prompt: dolly forward.
Economic activity in the logistics industry expanded in November, continuing a steady growth pattern that began earlier this year and signaling a return to seasonality after several years of fluctuating conditions, according to the latest Logistics Managers’ Index report (LMI), released today.
The November LMI registered 58.4, down slightly from October’s reading of 58.9, which was the highest level in two years. The LMI is a monthly gauge of business conditions across warehousing and logistics markets; a reading above 50 indicates growth and a reading below 50 indicates contraction.
“The overall index has been very consistent in the past three months, with readings of 58.6, 58.9, and 58.4,” LMI analyst Zac Rogers, associate professor of supply chain management at Colorado State University, wrote in the November LMI report. “This plateau is slightly higher than a similar plateau of consistency earlier in the year when May to August saw four readings between 55.3 and 56.4. Seasonally speaking, it is consistent that this later year run of readings would be the highest all year.”
Separately, Rogers said the end-of-year growth reflects the return to a healthy holiday peak, which started when inventory levels expanded in late summer and early fall as retailers began stocking up to meet consumer demand. Pandemic-driven shifts in consumer buying behavior, inflation, and economic uncertainty contributed to volatile peak season conditions over the past four years, with the LMI swinging from record-high growth in late 2020 and 2021 to slower growth in 2022 and contraction in 2023.
“The LMI contracted at this time a year ago, so basically [there was] no peak season,” Rogers said, citing inflation as a drag on demand. “To have a normal November … [really] for the first time in five years, justifies what we’ve seen all these companies doing—building up inventory in a sustainable, seasonal way.
“Based on what we’re seeing, a lot of supply chains called it right and were ready for healthy holiday season, so far.”
The LMI has remained in the mid to high 50s range since January—with the exception of April, when the index dipped to 52.9—signaling strong and consistent demand for warehousing and transportation services.
The LMI is a monthly survey of logistics managers from across the country. It tracks industry growth overall and across eight areas: inventory levels and costs; warehousing capacity, utilization, and prices; and transportation capacity, utilization, and prices. The report is released monthly by researchers from Arizona State University, Colorado State University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, and the University of Nevada, Reno, in conjunction with the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP).
Specifically, 48% of respondents identified rising tariffs and trade barriers as their top concern, followed by supply chain disruptions at 45% and geopolitical instability at 41%. Moreover, tariffs and trade barriers ranked as the priority issue regardless of company size, as respondents at companies with less than 250 employees, 251-500, 501-1,000, 1,001-50,000 and 50,000+ employees all cited it as the most significant issue they are currently facing.
“Evolving tariffs and trade policies are one of a number of complex issues requiring organizations to build more resilience into their supply chains through compliance, technology and strategic planning,” Jackson Wood, Director, Industry Strategy at Descartes, said in a release. “With the potential for the incoming U.S. administration to impose new and additional tariffs on a wide variety of goods and countries of origin, U.S. importers may need to significantly re-engineer their sourcing strategies to mitigate potentially higher costs.”
Grocers and retailers are struggling to get their systems back online just before the winter holiday peak, following a software hack that hit the supply chain software provider Blue Yonder this week.
The ransomware attack is snarling inventory distribution patterns because of its impact on systems such as the employee scheduling system for coffee stalwart Starbucks, according to a published report. Scottsdale, Arizona-based Blue Yonder provides a wide range of supply chain software, including warehouse management system (WMS), transportation management system (TMS), order management and commerce, network and control tower, returns management, and others.
Blue Yonder today acknowledged the disruptions, saying they were the result of a ransomware incident affecting its managed services hosted environment. The company has established a dedicated cybersecurity incident update webpage to communicate its recovery progress, but it had not been updated for nearly two days as of Tuesday afternoon. “Since learning of the incident, the Blue Yonder team has been working diligently together with external cybersecurity firms to make progress in their recovery process. We have implemented several defensive and forensic protocols,” a Blue Yonder spokesperson said in an email.
The timing of the attack suggests that hackers may have targeted Blue Yonder in a calculated attack based on the upcoming Thanksgiving break, since many U.S. organizations downsize their security staffing on holidays and weekends, according to a statement from Dan Lattimer, VP of Semperis, a New Jersey-based computer and network security firm.
“While details on the specifics of the Blue Yonder attack are scant, it is yet another reminder how damaging supply chain disruptions become when suppliers are taken offline. Kudos to Blue Yonder for dealing with this cyberattack head on but we still don’t know how far reaching the business disruptions will be in the UK, U.S. and other countries,” Lattimer said. “Now is time for organizations to fight back against threat actors. Deciding whether or not to pay a ransom is a personal decision that each company has to make, but paying emboldens threat actors and throws more fuel onto an already burning inferno. Simply, it doesn’t pay-to-pay,” he said.
The incident closely followed an unrelated cybersecurity issue at the grocery giant Ahold Delhaize, which has been recovering from impacts to the Stop & Shop chain that it across the U.S. Northeast region. In a statement apologizing to customers for the inconvenience of the cybersecurity issue, Netherlands-based Ahold Delhaize said its top priority is the security of its customers, associates and partners, and that the company’s internal IT security staff was working with external cybersecurity experts and law enforcement to speed recovery. “Our teams are taking steps to assess and mitigate the issue. This includes taking some systems offline to help protect them. This issue and subsequent mitigating actions have affected certain Ahold Delhaize USA brands and services including a number of pharmacies and certain e-commerce operations,” the company said.
Editor's note:This article was revised on November 27 to indicate that the cybersecurity issue at Ahold Delhaize was unrelated to the Blue Yonder hack.
The new funding brings Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, while maintaining the e-commerce giant’s position as a minority investor, according to Anthropic. The partnership was launched in 2023, when Amazon invested its first $4 billion round in the firm.
Anthropic’s “Claude” family of AI assistant models is available on AWS’s Amazon Bedrock, which is a cloud-based managed service that lets companies build specialized generative AI applications by choosing from an array of foundation models (FMs) developed by AI providers like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon itself.
According to Amazon, tens of thousands of customers, from startups to enterprises and government institutions, are currently running their generative AI workloads using Anthropic’s models in the AWS cloud. Those GenAI tools are powering tasks such as customer service chatbots, coding assistants, translation applications, drug discovery, engineering design, and complex business processes.
"The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," Matt Garman, AWS CEO, said in a release. "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies. We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration."