It's only July, but it's not too early to be thinking about heading back to school in the fall. Several universities that offer executive education programs have already announced their upcoming supply chain courses, some of which start as early as next month. Here's a look at some of those courses:
The Center for Supply Chain Research and the Executive Education Program at Penn State's Smeal College of Business will present a week-long course, "Managing Effective Supply Chains: Essentials of Supply Chain Management," next month. Scheduled for Aug. 15-19, the program, which is co-sponsored by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, aims to give participants the foundation for managing the various components of regional or global supply chains.
The course, one of three in the school's Certificate in Supply Chain Management program, includes a supply chain simulation exercise called LINKS, in which participants try different ways of improving a fictional company's overall financial, operating and market performance. For information, visit www.smeal.psu.edu/psep.
Later in the month, The Logistics Institute (TLI) at Georgia Tech will offer a pair of logistics-related courses. The first, "Logistics Performance, Cost and Value Measures," takes place on Aug. 23-24 and will look at how logistics performance improvements translate into operating and capital cost reductions and increased shareholder value. In the course, faculty will define the link between logistics performance and shareholder value; introduce a set of logistics performance benchmarks; and demonstrate how to use logistics performance gap analysis to justify new logistics initiatives.
On the following two days, TLI will offer a course on third-party logistics. The course will provide an overview of the 3PL marketplace, suggestions for evaluating whether outsourcing makes good business sense, case studies in third-party logistics, and techniques for managing third-party relationships. For information, visit the TLI Web site, www.tli.gatech.edu.
The University of Tennessee has also scheduled several executive-level courses for the next several months. It kicks off its academic year the week of Sept. 12-16 with two courses offered through the school's Center for Executive Education. The first course, "Logistics and Operations in the Supply Chain," will be held Sept. 12-14, followed by "The Lean Enterprise and the Supply Chain," on Sept. 14-16. Those two courses represent parts three and four of the center's Integrated Supply Chain Certification Program.
The fifth and six courses in the program, "Supply Chain Resource Management" and "Integrative Supply Chain Experience," will be held on the Knoxville campus from Nov. 14-16 and Nov. 16-18, respectively, while courses one and two, "Supply Chain Management Strategy" and "Demand Management in the Supply Chain," will be offered beginning Jan. 16, 2006. For information, visit https://SupplyChain.utk.edu/TC513.
“This traffic data suggests a relatively small number of bridges see a disproportionate amount of the largest ship traffic. It’s very clear where the heavy traffic is happening and these bridges should be prioritized for more careful and rigorous risk analysis,” Shields said.
To create the study, researchers used data mining techniques to identify the nation’s bridges that are the most vulnerable to a similar strike. First, they collected six years of U.S. Coast Guard data—logs detailing the precise location, heading, speed, and status of every ship traveling through the country’s waters on a minute-by-minute basis. Then they cross-referenced the geolocated shipping information with port data and bridge data from the National Bridge Inventory to determine which large ships passed under bridges. Finally, they built a program to analyze that data set to assess large-ship traffic under more than 200 major U.S. bridges.
The results show that three bridges had—by far—the most traffic from the very largest ships: The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in New York City, the Talmadge Memorial Bridge in Georgia, and two San Francisco Bay Area bridges. In addition, bridges with the most traffic from large (but not necessarily the very largest) ships include Houston’s Fred Hartman Bridge and several bridges along the Mississippi River including the Crescent City Connection in New Orleans. Meanwhile, the Francis Scott Key Bridge ranked among the top 10 bridges in very large ship traffic, with on average one ship longer than 300 meters (the size of the Dali) passing under it per day.
Shields cautioned that high ship traffic alone doesn’t necessarily mean a bridge is at high risk for collisions. Other variables that play a role include local shipping channel conditions, along with existing shipping safety practices, and individual bridge protections.
According to Indiana-based Wabash, its TaaS offering differs from traditional leasing because it ensures minimal downtime by providing a holistic solution that supports the full lifecycle of the trailer, from acquisition to maintenance and uptime management.
In addition to its TaaS service, Wabash makes products including: dry freight and refrigerated trailers, flatbed trailers, tank trailers, dry and refrigerated truck bodies, structural composite panels and products, trailer aerodynamic solutions, and specialty food grade processing equipment.
In turn, California-based Kodiak will focus on further developments to “Kodiak Driver,” its autonomous technology. The company last month said it had surpassed 50,000 miles of autonomous long-haul trucking by working in collaborations with other companies such as supply chain solutions provider J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. and tire and sustainable mobility vendor Bridgestone Americas.
The supply chain visibility and execution software startup Gnosis Freight has gained new funding from private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, the firms said today.
The investment supports Gnosis’ mission to help logistics companies work together better across the entire ecosystem, the seven-year old, South Carolina-based firm said. Gnosis says its tech provides a smarter way to track and manage containers and to collaborate with logistics partners in a single location.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
But Texas-based Vista said the “strategic growth investment” was made by the firm’s Endeavor Fund, which provides growth capital and strategic support to market-leading, high-growth enterprise software, data and technology-enabled companies that have achieved at least $10 million in recurring revenue.
“Gnosis is pioneering digital connectivity between logistics partners at a critical and complex juncture of the global supply chain,” Rachel Arnold, Co-Head of Vista’s Endeavor Fund and Senior Managing Director, said in a release.
In other recent deals, Vista last month acquired another supply chain tech firm, Jaggaer, from its previous private equity owner, Cinven, for an undisclosed amount.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) says the bipartisan legislation—called the Household Goods Shipping Consumer Protection Act—is needed because motor carriers are victimized through unpaid claims, unpaid loads, double brokered loads, or load phishing schemes on a daily basis.
The proposed act, which was introduced by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) and Congressman Mike Ezell (R-MS), offers a solution, OOIDA says. If passed, the bill would restore and codify FMCSA’s authority to issue civil penalties against bad actors. The legislation also requires that brokers, freight forwarders, and carriers provide a valid business address to FMCSA in order to register for authority.
According to Rep. Norton, the bill “would clarify that FMCSA has the authority to assess civil penalties for violations of commercial regulations, and crucially, to withhold registration from applicants failing to provide verification details demonstrating they intend to operate legitimate businesses. Americans moving across state lines need to be able to have confidence in FMCSA-licensed companies transporting their physical belongings. I'm thankful for Rep. Ezell’s partnership in co-leading this bill with me and look forward to the bill’s progress in the Senate.”
The bill has been endorsed by the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), American Trucking Associations’ Moving & Storage Conference (ATA-MSC), Owner-Operator Independent Driver Association (OOIDA), the National Association of Small Trucking Companies (NASTC), Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA), Institute for Safer Trucking (IST) and Road Safe America.
OOIDA is now calling for the bill to get a swift vote before the full U.S. House of Representatives.
"Freight fraud committed by criminals and scam artists has been devastating to many small business truckers simply trying to make a living in a tough freight market,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer said in a release. “OOIDA and the 150,000 small-business truckers we represent applaud the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee for its bipartisan approach in providing FMCSA better tools to root out fraudulent actors, which are also harmful to consumers and highway safety. Because of the broad industry support for these commonsense reforms, we hope this legislation will move to the full House of Representatives for a vote without delay.”
A coalition of freight transport and cargo handling organizations is calling on countries to honor their existing resolutions to report the results of national container inspection programs, and for the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to publish those results.
Those two steps would help improve safety in the carriage of goods by sea, according to the Cargo Integrity Group (CIG), which is a is a partnership of industry associations seeking to raise awareness and greater uptake of the IMO/ILO/UNECE Code of Practice for Packing of Cargo Transport Units (2014) – often referred to as CTU Code.
According to the Cargo Integrity Group, member governments of the IMO adopted resolutions more than 20 years ago agreeing to conduct routine inspections of freight containers and the cargoes packed in them. But less than 5% of 167 national administrations covered by the agreement are regularly submitting the results of their inspections to IMO in publicly available form.
The low numbers of reports means that insufficient data is available for IMO or industry to draw reliable conclusions, fundamentally undermining their efforts to improve the safety and sustainability of shipments by sea, CIG said.
Meanwhile, the dangers posed by poorly packed, mis-handled, or mis-declared containerized shipments has been demonstrated again recently in a series of fires and explosions aboard container ships. Whilst the precise circumstances of those incidents remain under investigation, the Cargo Integrity Group says it is concerned that measures already in place to help identify possible weaknesses are not being fully implemented and that opportunities for improving compliance standards are being missed.