Category Archives: Supply Chains

New model calculates how air transport connects the world

An inte3resting model from MIT scholars, which attempts to figure out how the world’s connectivity is changing. Its strength is looking at actual tickets purchased by customers to find out how they prefer to fly.

Here’s their video.


Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Article:

New model calculates how air transport connects the world | MIT News.

The article is summarized here, on MIT’s supply chain blog..

http://supplychainmit.com/2015/06/25/is-your-airport-well-connected/

 

Freight Logisticians Have Best Year Since Great Recession

This study points out that there are still many congestion issues, and they will be coming to a head in the Christmas shipping season, due to start soon.

Freight Logisticians Have Best Year Since Great Recession, However Capacity Issues Persist – Supply Chain 24/7.

L.A., Long Beach ports losing to rivals

The LA Times has a report on the large decrease of business for the Port of LA/Long Beach.  the decrease was from 39% to 32% of all container imports, in a ten-year period. Now it’s true, it is 32% of a larger pie.  But it is still a loss to the competition across the US.

It is interesting to note that the competition that is succeeding has focused on supply chain integration with inland transport and storage, rather than simply on fixing the port for large ships.

LA Times logo L.A., Long Beach ports losing to rivals amid struggle with giant ships – LA Times.

There are many examples of East Coast ports that have focused on supply chain integration rather than simply deepre harbors and on-port handling systems.  The Port of Virginia (Norfolk), which can already receive big ships, has connected to the Heartland Corridor, which brings goods all the way to Ohio.  Prince Rupert, Canada, with the help of the CN railroad, has built a corridor to Joliet IL just south of Chicago.  We can see the same concern for off-port transit in Houston.

Our article, which you will hopefully be able to read in white paper pre-publication form soon, talks about some of the issues of supply chain integration at Chicago.