Transporter 3: Logistics future or Hollywood tricks?

This weekend I watched "Transporter 3" the action movie about an ex-military expert that uses his superior driving skills and an Audi A8 to deliver "packages" for clients in remote areas in record time. He guarantee's 100% delivery success, I wish all 3PLs could say the same.

Anyway, in the opening sequence a giant cargo ship is loaded with containers. The camera pans down to two guys in the hull looking to swipe a few bottles of liquor from one of the containers. It's not clear, how they know liquor is in the container, but lets assume they saw this on the shipping manifest. In their efforts they break open the container only to find toxic chemicals that eventually kill them. But nearly simultaneously, as they break open the container an alarm goes off to alert the captain. This triggered my supply chain 5th sense, because this is essentially a "smart container." The director doesn't spend any time explaining what technology was used to trigger the break-in, but the cool thing is that this isn't Hollywood tricks. The wireless technology exists today to make these containers "smart." In fact, instead of just alerting the captain an alarm could also alert the owner of the container and/or the customs agency where it's heading. To take it a step further, the containers "smarts" don't have to stop at security. The containers can be wired to monitor temperature, humidity and/or if the container is shaking to much. To check out one of the vendors offering such a solution, visit http://www.arviem.com/

As for the movie itself, if you have seen Transporter 1 and 2, 3 doesn't prove to be much different.

How would you ship 500 trees to Iraq?

By plane, of course. I realize the holidays have just passed, but this was just too good not to share. I recently reconnected with an old friend from high school via Facebook and she posted the following photos of some charity work she organized in December. Basically, her organization worked with a nursery and collected 400 trees from Long Island, New York and 100 from California and had them shipped via DHL to the US troops in Iraq. I'd love to get more details regarding the customs processing, security technology and other supply chain related things, but these photos will have to do for now. A side note, depite the significant cut-backs by DHL in the US, its good to see that this still made it through.