Square is now hip for watermelons

With summer now in its first official days I long for tasty sweet watermelons, particularly on those hot days. And while I never thought much about how much space they took up in my parents refrigerator when I put on my supply chain hat I can see where the trouble lies -- they are not easy to store, pack or ship. Until now.

Not only do they weight a lot, but they are oval, making stacking them incredibly difficult. The solution is of course square and for $80 USD in Japan you can buy yourself a square watermelon apparently. The Japanese have figured out that if you put glass containers on the fruits as they begin to grow, as they mature, they will take the shape of the container. Brilliant.

While this is great for consumers, it's really great for green supply chains. No more empty space between oval fruits, now producers can stack them and ship them just like boxes of laptops, i.e. more watermelons in less space, means better efficiency. Now they just need to get the price down to something more reasonable.

AMR's Top 25 Highs and Lows

It's become almost an annual ritual, similar to the Fortune 500, the top billionaires and the AMR Top 25 Supply Chain report. No joking, what AMR has done with the top 25 over the years has done plenty in getting supply chains the recognition it deserves. Here are some of the highs and lows from my view.

Putting on my IBM hat, it's great to see we are still in the top 5. This year we climbed a spot to #4. I am particularly glad to see the reference to IBM's "people supply chain", which is just as complex as a hardware supply chain.

One company I am glad to not see in the list this year is Zara, the Spanish clothing retailer. While they are second to none in getting clothes from the catwalk to the shop floor, they suffer in quality and anyone that shops at Zara would back me up here.

Apple continues to hold the #1 spot.

Toyota is also curious at #10. This article in MarineLog reported that "Toyota had to rent a boat in Sweden to store 2,500 extra cars from inventory."

But overall I tip my hat to AMR and look forward to the next top 25 in 2010.