Internally promoting supply chain security and compliance

For this post I'd like to share a best practice. For the past month I've been working with IBM's internal supply chain security and compliance team. They came to me for help to promote the importance of their work to the IBM employees around the world. The result was internal memos, postings on our intranet a wiki to share best practices and a series of videos. The videos were shared more than 4,100 times from the last count and for me and the team that equals success. Most of the videos were humorous in nature. In one video, an employee illustrates the importance of including the right country of origin and the right value declaration when shipping things - he takes these rules for granted and eventually gets investigated. In another video, an employee talks about the importance in making sure the count is right for a bulk order as she counts individual tie tags that total more than 10,000.

While only a few minutes each, I think because they were funny employees shared them and in doing so spread the world. For the internal article we included a more dramatic video that I posted above to help stimulate you to think about promoting similar messages within your own company. After all, we all share the same supply chain.

Apple Puts the Cool Back in Manufacturing

So Apple announced it's new laptop updates yesterday and a significant portion of the buzz was focused on how they are manufactured. Apple's design aesthetic is know for being seamless and the main casing of the new Macbook's benefit as they are created out of a signal piece of aluminum that is cut down using a milling process from a brick of metal to the footprint of the laptop - all one seamless piece which Apple calls the unibody. The benefits are lighter and a more simple assembly process for starters, not to mention just a more pleasing design.

You can watch a video of the manufacturing process here. The manufacturing part starts after about 45 seconds and shows the steps from raw materials to the finished product.

This video should be shown at job fairs because it can do for manufacturing what the movie Top Gun did for the US Airforce and Navy, which was boost recruitment to record highs.

Using GPS to track cargo containers

Many months ago I blogged about some new services that were being created to help shippers track cargo using wireless technologies. Well a new one has recently gotten my attention by a little known company called arviem. One of the founding partners of arviem is a former colleague of mine Stefan Reidy. I only had the chance to work with Stefan for about 6 months and he had a passion for supply chains that matches mine, which is why I'm not surprised to see that company has launched.

The best way to describe arviem's service is to use a simply analogy. Let's say you are importing a container filled with bananas. While its very easy to get an estimate when this container will arrive, what if you could have real time updates when that container is in the middle of the ocean? And what if you could find out what the temperature of the container to make sure your bananas aren't going to spoil. Or what if some Somalian pirates decide to steal your container? Wouldn't it be great to track it down? Ahhh. Now you see the power of this solution.

Sweet Life already knows this. They are an innovative producer of high quality sweeteners, breath mints and semi-pharmaceutical products, has begun working with arviem to improve its global supply chain visibility for trade lanes between China and Europe.

To read more check out the press release here.