From chip shortages shuttering car plants for weeks to shipping delays and soaring costs, the pandemic has shone a spotlight on global supply chain deficiencies. Not all supply chain problems will linger. Take shipping, where freight costs along the world’s…
Should Nevada, which has only one warehouse actively using a rail siding, be relying more heavily on freight rail? The answer is yes, according to the state’s draft 2021 rail plan. The plan, currently under review by the Federal Railroad Administration,…
The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has shifted large parts of the economy, most notably with new demand in urban last-mile deliveries, closeness to consumer locations and reshoring supply chains in the United States. Companies and logistics providers have vigorously worked…
Of the many things 2020 taught us, one key takeaway was understanding the global supply chain's volatility. In the blink of an eye, offshoring manufacturing halted worldwide, forcing companies to find alternative ways to meet demand and advancing the reshoring…
Supply chain vulnerabilities have long been a concern in the Pentagon, but the Defense Department’s growing dependence on small drones, semiconductors and microelectronics manufactured by adversaries has gained increased attention in recent months. To address growing uneasiness, the House Armed…
Economic changes can seem like they happen at a supersonic pace, especially with so many metrics available for economic measurement. Anthony Smith and Zach Strickland discuss the actual speed of economic recovery in this episode of Freightonomics. Smith starts out…
Due to the impact of automation and robotics, the World Economic Forum expects 85 million jobs to be disrupted by 2025, while 97 million jobs will be created. We saw similar numbers in the 1990s when the computer boom decimated…
Plastics processors already short staffed due to a yawning skills gap faced sudden, desperate demand for products needed to respond to the coronavirus outbreak. Initial stop-gap, emergency manufacture for things like personal protective equipment (PPE) quickly converted to full-on reshoring,…
No one predicted 2020 would be the year when supply chain trends would shoot to the top of everyone's watch list. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted manufacturing and supply chains around the world. Auto production in South Korea was halted…
As manufacturers plot their paths forward, many are paying closer attention to supply chain resiliency and the need for stronger, tech-enabled supply chains that can withstand shocks. The global pandemic upended most of the business world, with a particularly pronounced…
We can learn a lot from history. In the face of a global pandemic that has upended the business world, the measures taken in the short-term will lead to significant shifts that will last for decades. We saw how the…
PTA Plastics has invested more than $2 million in six new injection molding machines—four Wittmann Battenfeld’s and two Engel’s—that it will divide between its facilities in Colorado and Connecticut. In total, the company acquired four machines from Wittmann Battenfeld and two from…
A major shock to supply chain operations, COVID-19 exposed the weaknesses of the current supply chain paradigm and forced firms to consider the challenges of rebuilding their supply chains due to supplier exits. For some industries, the pandemic even forced a major…
What products and components offer the biggest opportunities for reshoring? What advanced manufacturing technology is needed to enable the reshoring? To what degree did the pandemic disrupt supply chains, and how did it affect sourcing? To answer these questions and…
The novel coronavirus pandemic, along with the various shutdowns and slowdowns it caused, taught a lot of people whose jobs rub up against the supply chain some valuable lessons in 2020. As millions of businesses worldwide look to the new…
One of the surest methods for equitably reinforcing the U.S. economy is through the repatriation of overseas manufacturing jobs. Long desired, reshoring actually started in earnest prior to the pandemic, though it certainly gained momentum last year. There are many…
The Biden-Harris transition website posts Biden’s policy for U.S. manufacturing and for addressing supply chain shortages due to Covid19. But can we take what is written at face value? Like all politicians’ statements, this one is high-level, sweeping verbiage with little or no…
A trade war with China and the disruptive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have U.S. companies starting to question a decades-old strategy of shifting manufacturing operations to low-cost labor markets in China and other Asian nations. Some are starting to…
COVID, COVID, COVID. As I sat down to write my usual year-end review of plastics in the medical space, that’s what ran through my mind. Of course, there was nothing remotely normal about 2020, thanks to a once-in-a-century global pandemic.…
If designers are the fuel for packaging innovation, packaging production engineers are the engines that make it run — and as efficiently as possible. This may have been an atypical year in a lot of ways, but the country and…