Winsupply and Drone Express are working on their first drone delivery, which is set to travel on Aug. 9 from the Winsupply Distribution Center in Miamisburg, Ohio, to Centerville Winsupply in Washington Township. The three-mile flight will be the first in what the companies hope will be a wide range of drone deliveries of smaller products to reduce the impact on the environment.
Distributors have increasingly looked to distribution associations and buying groups over the past decade for guidance in dealing with supply chain, labor and pricing challenges, NetSuite's Ranga Bodla said in a recent episode of the MDM Podcast. "One of the things that we saw from the distribution associations we work with is that they were really the drivers of the message: 'Hey, you need to be transforming your organization, you need to be looking at digital, you need to be embracing the cloud," said Bodla, who discussed Netsuite's new Associations and Buying Groups Program, which counts NAW among its founding members.
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Management of transportation has become a key priority in recent years due to continuing supply chain disruptions, and 70% of respondents in Gartner's 2021 Logistics and Contract Manufacturing Outsourcing survey said they planned to bring at least one portion of outsourced logistics services back in-house. Brock Johns, a senior principal analyst on Gartner's Logistics and Customer Fulfillment team, offers advice on what to consider when weighing in-house versus outsourced transportation operations, including technology access and cost.
US supply chains were affected by 8,000 disruptive events during the first half of this year, up 46% year-over-year, with 54% being severe enough to warrant a "WarRoom" for supplier and customer communications and collaborations, according to a Resilinc analysis. Factory fires increased 131% and reached an all-time high, while the war in Ukraine contributed to a 500% increase in geopolitical-related disruptions and is expected to continue dampening production and material availability through the end of 2022.
Some 74% of business-to-business companies are boosting marketing budgets in 2022, an increase from 68% last year, according to research by Ascend2 and Wpromote. Social media, content marketing and paid search are the top three areas of investment, while revenue generation, brand awareness and a better customer experience are the top three objectives.
Lawmakers are planning to vote before November on the American Innovation and Choice Act, which aims to prevent technology platforms such as Amazon, Google and Meta from giving advantages to their own products. The law would apply to companies that generated at least $550 billion in the last 12 months or have at least 1 billion users, and the platforms must also have the function to act as a gateway for other businesses to connect with customers.
Your team may perceive you as negative if you're constantly pointing out the obstacles to new ideas, so be sure to offer affirmation and reframe challenges as opportunities, David Dye writes. Keep an eye on your own energy, Dye adds, recommending that if you're tired, ask others to bring you their ideas when you're feeling refreshed.
Leaders should train managers to recognize and address passive-aggressive behavior in their teams so they can respond properly if someone reports manipulation or sly remarks by others that make them feel uncomfortable and create a toxic environment, say experts. "These leaders need to be trained to notice subtle emotional cues and observe patterns in these behaviors," says Sankalp Chaturvedi, a professor at Imperial College Business School, London.
The NAW Billion Dollar Company Roundtables are an exclusive community of thought leaders from Billion Dollar distribution enterprises who congregate to network with noncompeting peers in multiple lines of trade on key issues. The companies invited into this community are from distribution firms at or above $1 billion in annual sales. Register today!
