Eyes and ears on the conference front

October brings us the annual conference of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP), this year taking place in Denver. It is one of the most important meetings in logistics or supply chain management every year, bringing together as it does practitioners, academics, vendors, and scribblers like those on my staff and me.

For the editors of DC Velocity and our sister publication, CSCMP's Supply Chain Quarterly, it is a chance to reconnect with many of the professionals we've engaged with over the years and to gather insights into the latest trends and developments in supply chain, logistics, transportation, and material handling. What we learn will help drive our coverage for the coming year.

The organizers have put together a program that covers a lot of ground—frankly, far more than any individual or even an entire staff can reasonably expect to take in. The trick in attending, I've learned over the past quarter century, is to pick your sessions carefully and to make sure to engage in plenty of conversation in the hallways. In fact, those informal conversations produce some of the best stories.

But only a small portion of our readers will have the chance to attend the conference, and that's where we come in. The editors hope to meet with some of the more innovative and forward-thinking practitioners taking part in the event and from those discussions, develop stories that may spur thoughts on ways you can improve your own company's performance.

As you are probably aware, we do that in a variety of ways today. Our print publication remains our principal way of reaching our audience, but we also know that you seek information via many other channels. So we've developed a series of electronic newsletters in addition to providing regular updates on developments in the logistics and supply chain world on our website, producing videos and webcasts on a variety of topics, and engaging more frequently with social media.

Our editors spend a good part of the year at conferences like CSCMP's and those offered by other excellent organizations, such as the Warehousing Education and Research Council, the National Industrial Transportation League, MHI (formerly the Material Handling Industry of America), and the International Warehouse Logistics Association. Even the largest of those can bring in only a minuscule fraction of the practitioners out there who can use the ideas and insights shared at those conferences. We consider it an important part of our role to act as your eyes and ears at those and other events.

As always, please let me know how you think we can do better.