Back in December, we welcomed two new members to our family: Milo and Otis, guinea pig brothers we adopted. Our first guinea pig, Bubbles, had passed away a few weeks earlier (after bringing us much joy and laughs for over four years), so we were very excited to bring Milo and Otis home and begin a new chapter of memories. MercuryGate Launches Global, Omni-modal Freight Procurement Solution. New Study: 70% of Executives have started Digital Supply Chain Transformation. MORE

Now, moving on to this week’s supply chain and logistics news… Amazon won a patent for an on-demand clothing manufacturing warehouse (Recode). JDA Unleashes New Levels of Supply Chain Visibility Across its Portfolio with TransVoyant. Oracle Warehouse Management Cloud Update Helps Businesses Scale Logistics to Meet Multi-Channel Demand. Apple Gets Permit to Test Self-Driving Cars in California (New York Times). MORE

A new report and industry survey from eyefortransport finds that automation is the top investment priority for retailers and manufacturers in 2019, particularly within the warehouse. The drive to get goods to customers at speed and to achieve operational efficiencies in what is currently a very tight labour market is pushing the investment environment to strongly focus on making more efficient warehousing operations that incorporate automation throughout. MORE

Carriers with business heavily in non-essential retail or automotive are scrambling to find new business to replace the idled capacity. New CLP and CDL issuance / testing restrictions. Many receiving facilities are experiencing a high volume of inbound freight. Many shippers are moving orders direct and by-passing intermediate warehouses. Letter from the CEO: Market Update April 2, 2020. By: Frank McGuigan, CEO, Transplace. MORE

How Freight Disrupted Itself. In the last year, a new dynamic has begun to reshape the freight industry. Phil knows his (freight) stuff. In his PhD thesis he developed a product to secure ocean freight rates with financial derivatives. And until recently, he was an archtypical “insider”, an executive at one of the world’s largest and most respected forwarders, DB Schenker, where he was responsible for the New York market. Declining Freight Rates. MORE

I received a few questions yesterday about Indago , our new market research community for supply chain practitioners that benefits charities. Indago is a Latin word that means “to investigate, search out, try to find/procure by seeking.”. Moving on, here’s the supply chain and logistics news that caught my attention this week: Amazon’s Freight Push Rattles Logistics Sector (WSJ – sub. Amazon the Freight Broker. Freight is a very big and very fragmented pie. MORE

Insiders joke (quite fairly, as it turns out) about billion-dollar procurement-management-disposition cycles that are managed in spreadsheets. In the procurement space, what I want to be able to assess is risk management. MORE

Jason Rosing is the Managing Partner at Veridian, a third-party integrator, heavily working with major names, like Manhattan Associates, HighJump and JDA, to bring visibility and maximum use of warehouse management systems. His works remain expansive—from procurement through reverse logistics and even facilities management for the supply chain itself. . She previously wrote about New York cultural institutions, law firms, and corporate law. MORE

With how quickly new technology, tips and warehouse management techniques are emerging, wouldn’t it be nice to take a page from someone else’s book? Bed Bath & Beyond @BedBathBeyond Bed Bath & Beyond has discovered a way to save millions of dollars on freight over the next few years, thanks to a new 755,000 square-foot distribution facility slated to open in the fall of 2019. In 2018, Wayfair expanded its warehouse and logistics investments in the U.S. MORE