When Ann M. Drake takes the stage at CSCMP's Annual Global Conference to accept the Distinguished Service Award, she will be the 47th person to receive the association's highest honor.
In 1994 she became one of the first women to run a major third-party logistics (3PL) company when she took over as chief executive officer and chairman of DSC Logistics. Since then, DSC has grown to become a nationwide network of integrated logistics and supply chain operations.
Drake's efforts at breaking down barriers—both for herself and for others—are part of the reason why she was chosen for the award. "Ann Drake is a person who is continually making contributions to the supply chain discipline, giving of herself to the people in the industry," said Rick Blasgen, CSCMP president and chief executive officer. "She is the epitome of what the Distinguished Service Award embodies—a leader, a mentor, a pioneer, and an extraordinary, energetic ambassador for the logistics and supply chain management professions."
In addition to leading DSC Logistics, Drake holds many volunteer positions. She is vice chairman of the Business Advisory Council for the Northwestern University Transportation Center. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the A.M. Castle Company, the Board of Governors for Chicago's Metropolitan Planning Council, and the Board of Governors for The Committee of 200, a global organization of women business leaders. Earlier this year she received the Alumni Merit Award from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and in 2009 was named "Industry Leader of the Year" by the Illinois Institute of Technology. Recently she agreed to serve as transportation and logistics strategy leader for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs.
Drake earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa and her Master of Business Administration degree from the Kellogg School of Management.
CSCMP presents the Distinguished Service Award annually to an individual who has made significant contributions to the art and science of supply chain and logistics management.
Plan ahead with CSCMP
It's not too early to start thinking about ways to expand your supply chain knowledge in 2013. Here are some workshops and programs from CSCMP that can help you develop the skills and expertise you need to succeed in your job.
Fundamentals of Supply Chain Management: This course provides an introduction to supply chain management for those who are new to the field, managers who have taken on broader supply chain responsibilities, and experienced specialists who want to know more about the end-to-end supply chain. (March 11-12, May 20-21, and November 12-13)
Sales and Operations Planning: This workshop focuses on the key role that supply chain management plays in facilitating sales and operations planning activities, processes, and outcomes. (April 8-9)
Transportation: Challenges and Solutions: This program explores different transportation modes and types of carriers, the effects of globalization on transportation, current obstacles to meeting performance objectives, the changing shipper/carrier relationship, and emerging trends. (April 22-23)
From Strategy to Reality: How SCM Turns Corporate Ideas into Results: This high-level workshop offers a comprehensive overview of the strategic options and alternatives for supply chain management that corporations should consider. (May 6-7)
Distribution Center Planning and Operations: This workshop looks at both the high-level planning and the detailed execution needed to run an efficient distribution facility. (June 11-12)
Relationships and Collaboration Meet Performance Metrics: In two consecutive one-day sessions, participants will learn about tools and techniques for building, maintaining, and rescuing business relationships as well as how to create high-trust, high-performance alliances. (August 1-2)
Sourcing and Procurement: This workshop covers the essentials of sourcing and procurement in an integrated context. It emphasizes strategic sourcing, supplier relationship management, contracts, and setting priorities for sourcing and procurement management and staff. (September 9-10)
All workshops will be held at CSCMP's headquarters in Lombard, Illinois, USA. To register, click here.
Doctoral Dissertation Award recognizes research on product variety
Many industries have used product variety over the last few decades as a way to increase sales and profits. While that may be beneficial for manufacturers, little is known about how it affects the distributors that handle those products. That was one of the main reasons Dr. Xiang Wan, assistant professor of supply chain management at the University of Tennessee, chose to focus his doctoral dissertation on the impact that product and service variety has on soft drink distributors' supply chains.
His research, titled "Product Variety, Service Variety, and Their Impact on Distributors" will receive CSCMP's 2012 Dissertation Award at the Annual Global Conference. Comprising three separate essays, Wan's paper uses a series of empirical analyses to look at the effect of product variety on sales and the influences of product and service variety on both demand and costs.
"The main purpose of my dissertation is to help practitioners solve practical supply chain management problems," said Wan. "The soft drink industry provided an excellent forum for studying how product variety influences operational and sales performance." Although the study was based on a data sample from soft drink distributors, the research method, analysis procedure, and estimated results may be applied to other distribution channels with large logistics networks as well as to industries with a high degree of product variety, he added.
Wan received his doctorate in supply chain management from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, where he has won awards for teaching and research.
CSCMP's Doctoral Dissertation Award is presented annually to the author of a submitted doctoral dissertation in a logistics- or supply chain-related field. The selected work must demonstrate significant originality and technical competence while contributing to the logistics and supply chain knowledge base.
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."