India is playing an increasingly important role in the global supply chain as both a producer and a consumer. No wonder, then, that CSCMP's India 2013 conference will bring together supply chain executives from such brand-name, global companies as Wal-Mart, Tata, Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, Nokia, Starbucks, and Kraft, among others.
The keynote address will be given by John Phillips, senior vice president of customer supply chain and logistics for PepsiCo Inc. Phillips will share insights into the future of the consumer value chain, including the findings from the Consumer Goods Forum Future Value Chain 2020 Initiative, a study based on input gathered from senior executives of retail and consumer packaged goods companies worldwide.
Other sessions will look at supply chain efficiency and cost management, supply chain strategic planning, infrastructure and technology, sustainability, and challenges in retail logistics.
Europe conference offers timely advice on cost control
Supply chain managers who are trying to maintain operational excellence amid Europe's atmosphere of fiscal austerity will find plenty of helpful advice at the 2013 CSCMP Europe Conference in Amsterdam. The conference theme: "How to Cut Supply Chain Costs without Paying the Price."
The program will focus on reducing administrative and operating costs, improving sourcing strategies, and using sustainability as a driver of supply chain cost reductions. Sessions will include insights, best practices, and techniques from leading supply chains.
The conference also includes the European Research Seminar, which examines current issues in European logistics and supply chain management.
Since 1967, CSCMP has sponsored executive education courses at Michigan State University that have blended academic rigor and real-world experience. This year's Supply Chain Logistics Management Executive Seminar is no different; it combines thought-leading teachings on supply chain integration, performance measurement, technology, and organizational dynamics with lessons learned from world-class logistics organizations.
The seminar is designed for experienced executives whose firms have begun or plan to implement integrated logistics within the context of an overall supply chain strategy. The seminar faculty consists of academic and industry experts who are thought leaders in supply chain and logistics management.
Program: Supply Chain Logistics Management Executive Seminar Location: Lansing, Michigan, USA Dates: May 5-10, 2013 Sponsor: Michigan State University, CSCMP Info:edp.broad.msu.edu/events/16
ProMat 2013 focuses on the future
ProMat, the biennial tradeshow organized by the Material Handling Industry of America (MHIA), will draw an expected 30,000 visitors to Chicago for a look at 800-plus exhibits showcasing new equipment and technology—everything from driverless forklift trucks, robots, and high-tech storage equipment to the latest in conveyors, pallets, packaging, and more.
The event, scheduled for January 21 to 24, will be held at Chicago's McCormick Place. To help visitors navigate the 300,000 square feet of exhibit space, ProMat's organizers have arranged exhibitors into four "solution centers":
The Manufacturing and Assembly Solutions Center, which will feature automated assembly support, robotics, ergonomic and safety equipment, work stations, and other equipment and systems for the manufacturing environment.
The Fulfillment and Delivery Solutions Center, which will feature solutions for traditional and e-commerce order fulfillment, order picking and packaging, third-party logistics, warehousing, distribution, and transportation.
The Information Technology Solutions Center, which will feature radio frequency identification (RFID), auto ID and data collection, and supply chain software solutions for transportation, manufacturing, logistics, enterprise resource planning, and order management, among other functions.
The Knowledge Center, which will house nearly 100 on-floor educational seminars.
All three of the show's keynote presentations will look toward the future. Henrik I. Christensen, KUKA Chair of Robotics and director of robotics at Georgia Tech, will talk about a new wave of robots that is revolutionizing manufacturing and distribution. Steve Forbes will draw on his experience as chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media to discuss the economic outlook for the next couple of years. And futurist Edie Weiner and the heads of four influential industry organizations will discuss the future of material handling, logistics, and the supply chain.
CSCMP will have a significant presence at ProMat. On the third day of the conference, CSCMP President and CEO Rick Blasgen will take part in the panel discussion led by Weiner. Additionally, Rich Sherman, director of strategic development, will moderate a panel of senior supply chain executives who will discuss how logistics and supply chain management are evolving to meet future business challenges. Panel members include CSCMP members Heather L. Sheehan, vice president of indirect sourcing and logistics for Danaher Corporation; Jeff Starecheski, vice president of logistics for Sears Logistics Services; and John Caltagirone of Loyola University, Chicago.
Event: ProMat 2013 Dates: Jan. 21-24, 2013 Location: Chicago, Illinois, USA Organizer: Material Handling Industry of America (MHIA) Info:www.promatshow.com
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."