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.
Many educators and researchers in supply chain management began their careers in industry. That's where Dr. Judith M. Whipple, associate professor in the Department of Supply Chain Management at Michigan State University (MSU), got her start. After working at General Motors in production, purchasing, and materials management, she went on to earn a Ph.D. in Business Administration with a minor in Logistics from MSU under the guidance of her mentor, the late Dr. Donald Bowersox. A respected researcher, Whipple has written or co-written more than 80 research papers, book chapters, case studies, and magazine articles, and has delivered more than 100 presentations at conferences and seminars. She's received numerous awards, including "best paper of the year" from the Journal of Operations Management, the International Journal of Logistics Management, and (twice) from the Journal of Business Logistics.
But Whipple is noted for more than just her research and publications; her teaching has won accolades as well. She's been recognized in the field of education, winning Michigan State's Teacher-Scholar Award and Teacher of the Year from the Supply Chain Management Association. In this interview with Managing Editor Toby Gooley, Whipple talks about her passion for teaching and the importance of collaboration between industry and academia.
Name: Dr. Judith M. Whipple Title: Associate Professor, Department of Supply Chain Management Organization: Broad College of Business, Michigan State University Education: GMI (now Kettering University), Bachelor of Science in Management Systems; Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration with a minor in Logistics, Michigan State University Work History: General Motors Corporation (production, purchasing, and materials management); director, Food Industry Management Program, Michigan State University; assistant professor, Food Marketing and Integrated Supply Management at Western Michigan University CSCMP Member: Since 1994
You worked at General Motors early in your career. Why did you switch from industry to academia?
My undergraduate degree is from GMI, now Kettering University. I studied logistics and started working for General Motors. When I decided to get a Ph.D., I was interested in the advanced study of logistics and purchasing, and I thought I would bring that knowledge back to my job. But the first year of my doctoral program I had the opportunity to teach, and I just loved it. I also had the opportunity to work with Don Bowersox and other faculty and doctoral students on a large-scale research project that resulted in the book World Class Logistics: The Challenge of Managing Continuous Change. Those experiences convinced me to follow a career in academics.
What kind of students are you teaching these days?
I teach only at the graduate level now, but early on in my career I taught more undergrad courses. I liked teaching undergrads because everything was so new and exciting to them. But MBA [Master of Business Administration] students are great to teach also because they're now starting to pull information from their work experiences and ask challenging questions, like why did a particular logistics strategy work for one industry but not for another?
I also teach doctoral students. That's especially satisfying because Don (Bowersox) and other faculty members who worked with me when I was a doctoral student really focused on teaching students how to be great academics, not just great doctoral students. I can offer my own doctoral students some of the same opportunities that were such great experiences for me.
We're a very close-knit group in the academic logistics/supply chain community. It's a very positive, supportive group of people who want to learn from and help each other. A lot of us have that "pay it forward" philosophy. That's not necessarily the case in some other disciplines.
What do you consider to be your most important mission as a supply chain educator?
Even though logistics and supply chain have come a long way in terms of recognition within businesses, we're still battling to get recognition in academia and as a career choice for students. So one important mission is teaching people across the university about the importance of supply chain management, and introducing prospective students to the field. Another is to help students learn about the power of logistics and understand how a company can become more successful by having a stronger supply chain network. It really is exciting to see students gain an appreciation of the complexity and challenges of supply chains. I love it when students tell me they can't go into a store now or order products online without thinking about supply chain management. They have a new understanding of the numerous steps and processes required to bring products to market, something often taken for granted.
I'm also excited about a project I'm involved in now. Michigan State is partnering with Intel, Arizona State University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on an outreach project, where we're developing supply chain-related activities for elementary and middle school classrooms. We are piloting five activities, such as a Lego car production exercise, for various grade levels, and we're excited by some of the early successes. Our goal next year is to develop more advanced materials to use in high schools. Ultimately, the outreach program will help increase awareness of supply chain management as a field of study among pre-collegiate students and spark interest in supply chain management careers.
We want the outreach materials to be open-sourced and available free for anyone to use. When the materials are finalized, they will likely be made available on the CSCMP website. We've framed the activities in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) context because teachers are often looking for those types of materials to increase STEM literacy. Also, the activities are designed to be fun and interactive.
MSU teaches supply chain management in its business school. Why should business students know about supply chain management?
Because Michigan State is so well-known and well-established in supply chain education, about half of our MBA students are supply chain management majors, and our undergraduate enrollment is up about 20 percent. But all MBA and undergraduate business students are required to take a supply chain course. It makes sense: How can you make good business decisions without understanding supply chains? Take something like capital, which is so constrained now. How could a finance major make good capital decisions without understanding supply chain management? They have to understand how their financial decisions might impact supply chain performance, from either a cost or service standpoint.
How important is communication and collaboration between academics and practitioners?
In order to conduct relevant research, I need to be listening to and working with practitioners. That enables me to keep my research focused on issues that matter to industry professionals. That, in turn, helps me in the classroom because I can talk to students about what's really going on in industry and share best practices.
On the flip side, people in industry often don't have as much time as they would like to learn about what's going on outside their industry and at other companies. We can help by conducting managerially relevant research that offers meaningful insights managers can apply within their companies. It's important for academics and practitioners to continue to collaborate, and professional associations help to facilitate that collaboration.
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."