This Week, We're Back With Part 2, Including a Summary and the Complete Q&A

CSCMP and Rosalyn Wlson are back with their annual State of Logistics Report. We're back with our review and comment, as a variety of pressures continues to drive logistics costs higher.

SCDigest editor Dan Gilmore has a great one on one interview with Dick Cantwell of Procter & Gamble on a range of RFID and EPC topics. Here are the highlights.

Perhaps no word gets tossed around more in supply chain than optimization. Sorting out optimization from other technical approaches to decision-making, such as heuristics and simulation, isn't easy. We give it a try.

After several weeks on the road, SCDigest editor Dan Gilmore wonders if he can discern any consistent themes from his journeys. He thinks yes, including the relentless, Wall Street-driven pressure to reduce supply chain costs, Lean mania, supply chain organizations being run very thin, and more.

Is the US transportation infrastructure in crisis or not? How much does the answer really matter to shippers? Supply Chain Digest addresses these questions and more, stemming from a forum at Georgia Tech that focused on capacity and infrastructure challenges for the supply chain.

Supply chain transformation happens for all kinds of reasons. In the case of Coats North America, a dramatic change in its customer base due to low cost country sourcing meant its supply chain network was badly misaligned. The company took that opportunity to not only reconfigure its supply chain network, but to transform to strategy, processes and technology to move from push to pull.

SCDigest editor Dan Gilmore attended the annual Warehouse Education and Research Council (WERC) conference in Nashville. He found the conference and material, which focused almost exclusively on warehousing and distribution topics, to be excellent. We review the conference, and summarize a few of the most interesting sessions we attended.

Just what is a Supply Chain Best Practice? We tackled this issue a few weeks ago, and generated a great amount of reader response. This week, we publish highlights of some of the best comments we received from Supply Chain Digest readers.

At some point, the magic tipping point will be reached, and some consumer goods and other companies will be able to start RFID tagging in manufacturing. That will open a virtual warehouse of opportunities to finally get ROI, but the big question is Will anyone have the WMS software to do it?