Supply chain industry organization reveals several key award winners, including Best Paper Award, Plowman Award, Innovation Award, and Hall of Fame Inductees.
The Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) kicked off its annual EDGE virtual conference by presenting several prestigious awards to honor its supply chain professional members who have contributed to the advancement and betterment of the industry.
During CSCMP’s Virtual Academic Research Symposium on Sunday, September 20, the 2020Bernard J. LaLonde Best Paper Award, given to the most valuable paper published in the Journal of Business Logistics (JBL), was awarded to Dung H. Nguyen, vice dean at the Faculty of International Economic Relations, University of Economics and Law (Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City); Sander de Leeuw, professor of supply chain management at Nottingham Business School, Nottingham (U.K.), and associate professor of logistics and operations management at the School of Business and Economics of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Netherlands); Wout Dullaert, professor of supply chain logistics at the School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Netherlands); and Bram P.J. Foubert, associate professor of marketing modeling at the School of Business and Economics of Maastricht University (the Netherlands), for their paper, “What is the Right Delivery Option for You? Consumer Preferences for Delivery Attributes in Online Retailing.”
Also awarded Sunday evening was the 2020 E. Grosvenor Plowman Award. Presented annually to the best research paper submitted for presentation at the Academic Research Symposium, this year’s winner was Dr. Remko van Hoek for his paper entitled, “Not Your Normal Gameplan – An Exploration of Supply Chain Risk Management During the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Game Theory, Event Theory and Dynamic Capability Theory.” His paper was selected by the Editorial Review Panel and the award was given in honor of E. Grosvenor Plowman, a lifetime supporter of both the CSCMP organization and the logistics profession.
The third and final award given during the symposium was the 2020 Teaching Innovation Award. Each year, the Academic Research Symposium organizers devote an academic track to supply chain management teaching innovation and pedagogy. CSCMP members are invited to submit papers to this educational track for consideration, and the Editorial Review Panel selects the submission with “the largest impact on students and instruction within the field of supply chain and logistics.” This year Sam Silva-Nash, Dr. Carole Shook, and Kara Patterson of the University of Arkansas took home the award for their submission entitled “Drive Towards Success: A Case Study."
On Monday, CSCMP named its newest Supply Chain Hall of Fame inductees—individuals that have made outstanding contributions to the supply chain discipline and served as role models to supply chain students, young professionals, budding entrepreneurs, or career supply chain professionals. Taiichi Ohno, creator of the Toyota Production System (LEAN) and Matthew A. Waller, Ph.D., the 2020 CSCMP Distinguished Service Award Recipient, now join the ranks of past recipients like Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, and Malcom McLean, developer of the modern intermodal shipping container.
Several additional awards will be announced in the next few days. All award winners will be listed on the CSCMP website at the conclusion of the EDGE Conference this week.
The New Hampshire-based cargo terminal orchestration technology vendor Lynxis LLC today said it has acquired Tedivo LLC, a provider of software to visualize and streamline vessel operations at marine terminals.
According to Lynxis, the deal strengthens its digitalization offerings for the global maritime industry, empowering shipping lines and terminal operators to drastically reduce vessel departure delays, mis-stowed containers and unsafe stowage conditions aboard cargo ships.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
More specifically, the move will enable key stakeholders to simplify stowage planning, improve data visualization, and optimize vessel operations to reduce costly delays, Lynxis CEO Larry Cuddy Jr. said in a release.
The Dutch ship building company Concordia Damen has worked with four partner firms to build two specialized vessels that will serve the offshore wind industry by transporting large, and ever growing, wind turbine components, the company said today.
The first ship, Rotra Horizon, launched yesterday at Jiangsu Zhenjiang Shipyard, and its sister ship, Rotra Futura, is expected to be delivered to client Amasus in 2025. The project involved a five-way collaboration between Concordia Damen and Amasus, deugro Danmark, Siemens Gamesa, and DEKC Maritime.
The design of the 550-foot Rotra Futura and Rotra Horizon builds on the previous vessels Rotra Mare and Rotra Vente, which were also developed by Concordia Damen, and have been operating since 2016. However, the new vessels are equipped for the latest generation of wind turbine components, which are becoming larger and heavier. They can handle that increased load with a Roll-On/Roll-Off (RO/RO) design, specialized ramps, and three Liebherr cranes, allowing turbine blades to be stowed in three tiers, providing greater flexibility in loading methods and cargo configurations.
“For the Rotra Futura and Rotra Horizon, we, along with our partners, have focused extensively on energy savings and an environmentally friendly design,” Concordia Damen Managing Director Chris Kornet said in a release. “The aerodynamic and hydro-optimized hull design, combined with a special low-resistance coating, contributes to lower fuel consumption. Furthermore, the vessels are equipped with an advanced Wärtsilä main engine, which consumes 15 percent less fuel and has a smaller CO₂ emission footprint than current standards.”
Specifically, loaded import volume rose 11.2% in October 2024, compared to October 2023, as port operators processed 81,498 TEUs (twenty-foot containers), versus 73,281 TEUs in 2023, the port said today.
“Overall, the Port’s loaded import cargo is trending towards its pre-pandemic level,” Port of Oakland Maritime Director Bryan Brandes said in a release. “This steady increase in import volume in 2024 is an encouraging trend. We are also seeing a rise in US agricultural exports through Oakland. Thanks to refrigerated warehousing on Port property near the maritime terminals and convenient truck and rail access, we are well-positioned to continue to grow ag export cargo volume through the Oakland Seaport.”
Looking deeper into its October statistics, loaded exports declined 3.4%, registering 66,649 TEUs in October 2024, compared to 68,974 TEUs in October 2023. Despite that slight decline, the category has grown 6.7% between January and October 2024 compared to the same period last year.
In fact, Oakland’s exports have been declining over the past decade, a long-term trend that is largely due to the reduction in demand for recycled paper exports. However, agricultural exports have made up for some of the export losses from paper, the port said.
For the fourth quarter, empty exports bumped up 30.6%. Port operators processed 29,750 TEUs in October 2024, compared to 22,775 TEUs in October 2023. And empty imports increased 15.3%, with 15,682 TEUs transiting Port facilities in October 2024, in contrast to 13,597 TEUs in October 2023.
A growing number of organizations are identifying ways to use GenAI to streamline their operations and accelerate innovation, using that new automation and efficiency to cut costs, carry out tasks faster and more accurately, and foster the creation of new products and services for additional revenue streams. That was the conclusion from ISG’s “2024 ISG Provider Lens global Generative AI Services” report.
The most rapid development of enterprise GenAI projects today is happening on text-based applications, primarily due to relatively simple interfaces, rapid ROI, and broad usefulness. Companies have been especially aggressive in implementing chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs), which can provide personalized assistance, customer support, and automated communication on a massive scale, ISG said.
However, most organizations have yet to tap GenAI’s potential for applications based on images, audio, video and data, the report says. Multimodal GenAI is still evolving toward mainstream adoption, but use cases are rapidly emerging, and with ongoing advances in neural networks and deep learning, they are expected to become highly integrated and sophisticated soon.
Future GenAI projects will also be more customized, as the sector sees a major shift from fine-tuning of LLMs to smaller models that serve specific industries, such as healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, ISG says. Enterprises and service providers increasingly recognize that customized, domain-specific AI models offer significant advantages in terms of cost, scalability, and performance. Customized GenAI can also deliver on demands like the need for privacy and security, specialization of tasks, and integration of AI into existing operations.
The Port of Oakland has been awarded $50 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration (MARAD) to modernize wharves and terminal infrastructure at its Outer Harbor facility, the port said today.
Those upgrades would enable the Outer Harbor to accommodate Ultra Large Container Vessels (ULCVs), which are now a regular part of the shipping fleet calling on West Coast ports. Each of these ships has a handling capacity of up to 24,000 TEUs (20-foot containers) but are currently restricted at portions of Oakland’s Outer Harbor by aging wharves which were originally designed for smaller ships.
According to the port, those changes will let it handle newer, larger vessels, which are more efficient, cost effective, and environmentally cleaner to operate than older ships. Specific investments for the project will include: wharf strengthening, structural repairs, replacing container crane rails, adding support piles, strengthening support beams, and replacing electrical bus bar system to accommodate larger ship-to-shore cranes.