Supply Chain View

More interesting stuff in Focus (shock, horror!) In the May 2010 edition Maggie Heraty describes what she saw and experienced while on mission with RedR. Maggie arrived in Haiti just over three weeks after the earthquake to identify training needs for NGO staff in the immediate disaster response phase, and longer term looking at recovery [...]

Mike Whiting has written an excellent article on the emergency response to January’s Haiti earthquake in the April 2010 edition of Logistics and Transport Focus. My copy of Focus often languishes in the in-tray for a couple of weeks before I even get the plastic wrap off, but I’d urge all CILT members to read [...]

This came round on a Current Awareness Bulletin from CILT but the link was mangled – eventually I found the right site. This is pleasingly low-tech: a google map with customised icons linked to some database info about each port or rail freight terminal. This is the multimodal map‘s own website. This is what it [...]

Trying to present statistics in an interesting and engaging way is terribly challenging. In the supply chain world, we often have to communicate rather dry numbers that imply significant conclusions for how our business should be run. This has been kicking around the internet for some time now, so apologies if you’ve seen it before. [...]

I forgot to mention in my post yesterday about last week’s HELP Forum meeting that Mike Whiting has also written about the air operation during Nargis, both the air-bridge from Bangkok and the helicopter operation in-country. Mike was OiC for Aviation for the Logs Cluster, so this is an authoritative account. You can find his [...]

The CILT‘s Humanitarian and Emergencies Logistics Professionals (HELP) Forum met again on Tuesday last week (28 Oct 2008). It was another interesting session, so I thought I would post a brief report (with a long title). My apologies if I have mangled any of the following in transcribing my notes. For those that don’t know, [...]

It has been a long time since I updated the site, almost a year in fact. Although my last employer didn’t explicitly forbid my sharing my professional thoughts on line, they did make it clear they were uncomfortable with it and I decided to respect their wishes. But now that I have moved on, I [...]

While working on a European distribution strategy assignment for a client earlier this year, I did some work on how to use lower-carbon multi-modal transport and still get goods to the customer on time. So I was interested to read about Tesco’s latest innovation – bringing imported wine down Manchester Ship Canal by barge. My [...]

As I’ve been working from home a lot recently, I’ve had the radio on to give the office a bit of a ‘buzz’ and today I overheard this story on BBC 6 Music. Camelot have withdrawn a lottery scratchcard because customers couldn’t work out when they had won. The customers’ confusion stems from the concept [...]

There was a pretty depressing story in the Guardian a few days ago that proposes, in typical newspaper hyperbole, that Britain is in the grip of a numeracy crisis. For once, the concern is justified. According to the article, there are 3 times as many UK adults with poor numeracy than poor literacy. That’s 15.1 [...]