Today’s priorities for supply chain leaders

Over the last three years, the main focus for many supply chain leaders has been resiliency. Disruptions have been rife, with the chain of events starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing with the blockage of the Suez Canal and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and leading to the impacts of the Red Sea attacks this year.

Resilience can mean different things, from the ability to continue buying inventory and delivering products to schedule, to simply maintaining profit margins. Ultimately, it is about being able to adapt quickly to unforeseen challenges.

Source: Unsplash

A key takeaway from the supply chain disruptions is that the backbone of business resiliency is cost management. At the start of the pandemic, transportation costs increased dramatically, and shippers were buying inventories wherever they could find them. US business logistics costs rose by a record 19.6 percent in 2022, and half of that increase was due to inventory carrying costs.

To remain successful, logistics decision-makers must prioritize both resiliency and cost management. The former means being dynamic and agile, requiring connectedness and real-time data. The latter means reducing expenditure, as high inventory levels and fulfillment & transportation costs could otherwise dent profitability. This is where a unified supply chain helps.

What is a unified supply chain?

Traditionally, in supply chains, transportation and distribution have been managed separately. This siloed approach often led to inefficiencies and missed opportunities for optimization across the entire network. A unified supply chain is an integrated approach to managing all its aspects, from sourcing raw materials to delivering finished products. Components such as distribution, transportation, labor management, and automation work as a cohesive system, usually through a single app. This enables real-time visibility and collaboration across the supply chain network, eliminating silos and redundancy.

At a software level, the Transport Management System (TMS) needs to be connected to the Yard and Warehouse Management System (WMS) to improve operational efficiency. Managers can quickly and easily add capacity, adjust labor to match inbound arrivals, and change orders up to the point that a truck leaves the depot. Such integration streamlines operations, reduces costs, and enhances agility, allowing companies to react quickly to changing market conditions and customer demands.

The benefits of bringing the TMS and WMS together

To achieve a unified supply chain, companies invest in cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, best built from microservices to enable easy integration and scalability. By adopting adaptable and boundary-less solutions, organizations can ensure rapid innovation, personalized customization, and enhanced connectivity across all supply chain functions.

Source: Unsplash

However, according to a recent McKinsey study, logistics leaders have significant concerns regarding technology investment, mostly surrounding the cost of the solution and the impact of change management. Businesses ideally want to lower their total vendor footprint and tech TCO while still boosting their ROI. While these goals may seem at odds with each other, a unified supply chain can ultimately work to achieve them these goals.

A unified supply chain consolidates disparate systems, such as distribution and transport management into a single, integrated solution. Without the need for specialized software for each function, businesses significantly reduce their vendor footprint. This streamlining simplifies technology management and lowers the TCO associated with licensing, maintenance, and support.

Another key characteristic of the unified supply chain is its ease of implementation and adoption compared to traditional, siloed systems. A solution that can be up and running quickly reduces the time-to-value and increases the ROI. Moreover, this lowers support costs by minimizing the need for customization and integration.

Consider Manhattan Active

Manhattan, a leading provider of supply chain management solutions, is the only vendor of a unified supply chain offering. The Manhattan Active Platform gives managers total control over adjuestments for supply, demand, resources, and shipment variations, allowing them to think in terms of inbound and outbound rather than WMS and TMS.

With the platform’s microservices-based architecture and API-first approach, organizations can easily integrate and customize their solution, reducing implementation time and costs. Manhattan Active supports various developmental approaches, including low-code, no-code, and custom coding, enabling IT teams to tailor solutions precisely to their requirements with minimum dependency on external vendors.

Instead of high-cost development to alter monolithic applications, internal teams can easily tune the platform to suit end-users’ requirements quickly and iterate on improvements according to need. And because the platform is cloud-based, core functionality is not affected.

By leveraging computational and behavioral intelligence, the platform optimizes decision-making processes and workforce productivity, ultimately driving cost savings and revenue growth. Manhattan’s cloud-native SaaS model eliminates the need for on-premises infrastructure, reducing maintenance and support costs while increasing scalability and accessibility. Continuous updates every 90 days ensure access to the latest capabilities without additional investment.

To learn more about how bringing together your TMS and WMS into a unified supply chain could transform your business, contact the expert Manhattan team today.

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Despite a very slight decline in size and number of warehousing facilities between 2022 and 2023, supply chain decision-makers expect both metrics to show net increases in the next four years. That’s one of the findings from Zebra 2023 Warehousing Vision Study, available here [PDF]. Yet the paper’s overarching message describes the industry’s desire to use technology to address the cost centers of existing operations and ensure a higher-capacity, more accurate future that aligns with rising customer expectations.

Source: Zebra Technologies

The constant headwinds currently prevalent in the industry need little explanation for readers of these pages, and the next few years will inevitably bring the types of supply chain disruptions that are sadly a fact of life in the sector – ocean piracy, war, and localised variation in economic conditions. But digitization, generally, and technology deployments in warehouses and distribution centers specifically have the capability to alleviate external negative influences, make companies more agile, and address many of the perennial problems that dog the sector. This article hopes to describe some of those solutions.

Perfect order profitability

Missed Sevice Level Agreements (SLAs) have varying causes, but errors on the warehouse floor rank high among the variables within the control of facility operators. Personnel must get technology and equipment training as they transition into areas best suited to on-the-spot decision-making. Luckily, reassignment to other areas and being given effective technology are very popular with employees. This could be a boon in a sector where staff turnover is too often accepted as the norm.

Fewer mistakes in general and higher efficiency from trained and equipped workers together mean better operations, of course. However, the secondary effects of automation also help produce a quicker ROI. Data metrics from the warehouse floor create objective, real-time pictures that inform managers’ decision processes. Additionally, investment in employees’ working conditions and careers makes the operator’s facilities an attractive destination for a prospective employee pool that’s often considered transitory.

A beacon of hope

While visions of automated warehousing systems bring to mind ranks of large robotized machines, many of the automation solutions that make the most significant differences to operations are much less eye-catching. Technologies like passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), 5G networks, and space optimization technologies are often discrete and can be deployed with little impact on operations during rollout. Wearables are highly effective in this context, enabling the workforce and the technology they use to work as one unit. Additionally, static or handheld RFID beacon readers are a proven technology many years into maturity, and their use at scale, with a relatively modest outlay, brings immediate positive results.

As technologies, these are especially effective in addressing some of the more labor-intensive operational processes that are correspondingly the source of high cost. Many operators have invested in inventory management solutions emphasizing customer experience, with the interesting effect that (according to the responses that formed the Zebra Warehousing Vision Study) warehouse workers feel less informed about available stock than customers. Operationally-focused inventory technology, on the other hand, ensures warehouse operators and workers on the warehouse floor have constant and accurate knowledge about stock levels.

Source: Zebra Technologies

Like the equipment and software that can transform employees’ roles, static warehouse technology provides significant data from automated operations, in addition to keeping the point-of-sale customer fully informed as to availability. Digital models of real-time processes in multiple facilities can be created, using automated sensor data plus input from handheld tech. In turn, so-called ‘digital twins’ allow companies to virtually test new processes, experiment with variations on current processes, and devise new working methods that optimize space, and prioritize personnel efficiency and safety.

The same data-driven approach also brings value further up the decision-making chain, allowing strategic planning – whether to extend existing facilities or break new ground, for example – to take place based on proven data rather than educated guesswork.

Conclusions

If we assume that the next few years will present a series of unexpected events outside the control of individual supply chain operators, then it’s apparent that agility and speed of ability to change are of high importance. Technology in the form of hardware and malleable software does not guarantee agility, per se. But the ability to at least cushion the blow of negative events that will unfold in the future is the least that technology adopters in the sector can expect.

By reducing the impact of known cost centers and equipping people and physical facilities with systems overseen by industry-specific solutions, supply chains develop resilience for the future. Return on investment will take the form of better margins in several areas of operations (customer experience, HR, adherence to SLAs, and so on) in the short to medium term. However, the long-term return on investment will be the very existence of a long-term: that is, resilience and the ability to adapt to change to ensure a viable economic future.

About Zebra Technologies

The Zebra 2023 Warehousing Vision Study can be found here[PDF]. The company is the primary consultative partner for and supplier of the world’s best supply chain-focused technology. To find out more about what it can offer, please contact a representative near you.

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“E-waste is going to be the richest ore of the future,” proclaims Jason Gaber, owner of Mount Baker Mining and Metals. Gaber has a YouTube channel where he shows viewers how hammer mills and shaker tables can be used to process component-laden circuit boards and separate plastics from a mix of metals, including gold.

The business of extracting gold and other valuable materials from electronic junk is growing and is even becoming a popular side hustle. One tonne of electronic circuit boards can yield in the region of 0.150 kg of gold, and over double that in silver. Plus, there’s likely to be anywhere from 250 – 300 kg of copper up for grabs per tonne of e-waste.

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For years, device users have been throwing away – collectively – billions of dollars in precious metals as they dispose of unwanted electronics.

In the beginning, e-waste was sent overseas to become somebody else problem. But processing e-waste has the potential to be many times more lucrative (and much less polluting) than trying to extract gold and other precious metals from ore mined from the ground.

The ability for environmental clean-up operations to turn a profit is seeing a wave of new e-waste recycling solutions enter the market. And for those can run their operations at scale, there’s money to be made in turning e-waste into gold.

One of the most ingenious approaches – which is still at an early stage, but generating commercially promising results – uses spongey nanofibrils created from a by-product of cheese-making to soak up gold ions in solution and turn them into flakes.

New sustainable method turns waste into gold! ETH Zurich researchers use protein sponge derived from food industry byproduct to recover precious metal from electronic waste. https://t.co/LkpuiFUMk1 #ProteinSponge #ElectronicWaste #SustainableGold @MezzengaRaf

— ETH Zurich (@ETH_en) March 1, 2024

Demonstrating the potential of their approach, researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland used their cheese waste creation to obtain a 450 mg gold nugget from 20 junk motherboards. According to the team, the material was 90.8 percent pure (21-22 carats), which values the reclaimed gold at around USD 28 – based on today’s scrap gold price.

What’s more, the group claims that the cost of the source materials and energy costs for the process represents just 1/50^th of the value of the gold extracted from the e-waste.

Googling ‘how to turn e-waste into gold’ produces plenty of search hits, but many of the recipes feature toxic chemicals. However, by employing a bio-derived ionic sponge, the ETH Zurich researchers believe that they’ve found a gentler path to converting unwanted electronics into valuable materials. And they are not the only ones pursuing more environmentally friendly e-waste processing.

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Green Friday? Circular economy trends for 2024

Mint Innovation, whose vision is to become the world’s leading provider of circular green metals, opened a commercial-scale facility in Sydney, Australia, in 2022. According to reports, the operation can salvage USD 85,000 in gold per day from recycled electronics – as well as being able to recover copper and other valuable metals.

Cleverly, Mint’s process –which was developed in New Zealand – makes use of bacteria and fungi that have evolved in regions rich in mine works and abandoned machinery. The organic soup is capable of absorbing metals and Mint exploits those properties to process e-waste in a more environmentally friendly way, compared with conventional methods.

According to Mint, everything leaving its plant is benign, which means that there are no chemical waste streams to be dealt with. And there’s more good news as the process is applicable to other waste stream such as used batteries and catalysts.

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• The Apple electric car destined never to hit roads.
• In truth, no one ever asked for an Apple electric car, and its projected price-point was absurd.
• Apple will now focus on generative AI.

Anyone remember that Apple electric car idea? One of the company’s most ambitious projects has finally been canned, much to the surprise of some 2000 employees working on it. The effort has been decades long but an internal announcement on Tuesday finally put the project to bed.

Chief operating officer Jeff Williams and vice president in charge of the electric car effort, Kevin Lynch, informed employees – who have remained anonymous given that the information isn’t yet public – that the project will begin winding down and staff shifted to the artificial intelligence division.

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The Apple electric car team was known as the Special Projects Group (SPG). Given the scale of AI hype, it’s no wonder that team is growing under executive John Giannandrea. AI projects are an increasingly key priority at Apple and, let’s face it, there weren’t many people still holding out for an Apple car.

Work on the idea began in 2014, the multi-billion-dollar effort called Project Titan would have catapulted Apple into a whole new industry. At its conception, the Apple electric car would have a limousine-style interior and voice-controlled navigation.

The project was never smooth sailing – at all. The team’s leadership and strategy was changed several times: Lynch and Williams only took the reins a few years ago, following the departure of Doug Field, who’s now a senior executive at Ford.

Publicly, Apple contemplated many designs. You could almost be forgiven for thinking that this was a major issue for the company in realizing its electric vehicle, but self-driving technology was also a concern. Apple began road-testing its system in 2017 with dozens of vehicles on US roads – all inside the interior of a Lexus SUV.

The Apple car system gets tested in an SUV shell. Via the Financial Times.

Just one month ago, it was reported that the Apple electric car project had reached a make-or-break point. More secretive components were tested on a track in Phoenix – the latest internal strategy had been to delay the car’s release until 2028 and reduce its self-driving specifications from Level 4 to Level 2+ technology.

One idea, scrapped earlier than the whole project, was a car with no steering wheel or pedals. Time also went into the development of a remote command center that could take over for a driver. The SPG included employees from across the car industry, with designers from Aston Martin, Lamborghini, BMW and Porsche.

The car had been imagined at a cost of $100,000 but executives worried the vehicle wouldn’t achieve the profit margins Apple typically enjoys on its other products. There were also concerns from the board about spending millions of dollars every year on a project that might never be realized.

The move is a relief to investors, who sent Apple shares up on Tuesday after the news broke. Elon Musk has also celebrated the move – less competition for his Tesla – in typically graceless fashion, by posting a saluting emoji and a cigarette emoji on his platform X. If only there were a good verb for posting to what used to be Twitter.

Oh stop, our sides are splitting…

The move from Apple may just reflect the cooling of the EV market. Sales growth has wavered thanks to high prices and poor charging infrastructure discouraging mainstream buyers. Not that any new Apple product is viable for the mainstream buyer when it’s first released…

Still, the entire EV industry is pivoting, with General Motors and Ford shifting their attention to hybrid vehicles thanks to a lack of EV demand and too many manufacturing bottlenecks. Across the industry, automakers are slashing battery-electric car prices, production targets and – crucially for Apple – profit forecasts.

Apple is still heavily investing in other areas: it has spent $113 billion on research and development over the past five years with an average annual growth rate of 16%. Of course, it also launched the Vision Pro headset, its first new product category in almost a decade, with remarkable – not to say baffling – success.

Ultimately, focusing on AI may be a better bet, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Anurag Rana and Andrew Girard said in a note. “Apple’s decision to abandon electric cars and shift resources toward generative AI is a good strategic move, we believe, given the long-term profitability potential of AI revenue streams versus cars.”

Ultimately, then, the Apple electric car isn’t a huge loss, but it does prove that the technology industry is increasingly making cuts in other major project areas to keep up with AI development.

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• The US wants to regain its leadership within the chip industry, and Commerce Sec. Raimondo targets 20% domestic production of leading-edge chips by 2030.
• The US currently produces none; hence, the ambitious goal is set for the end of this decade.
• Biden admin aims to bring memory chip production to the US “at scale.”

As the global demand for semiconductors surges, the US has embarked on a bold mission to revitalize its chip manufacturing industry. Last February, the Commerce Department launched the CHIPS for America program, echoing the ambitious spirit of the space race era. While US companies lead in AI development, the absence of domestic chip production poses a critical challenge. However, with a strategic focus on talent development, R&D, and manufacturing, the US aims to fill this gap and produce 20% of the world’s leading-edge chips by 2030. 

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Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo remains optimistic about the program’s potential to transform America’s industrial landscape. The US aims to fortify its supply chains and reduce reliance on geopolitical rivals by investing in leading-edge logic chip manufacturing and onshoring memory production. “Our investments in leading-edge logic chip manufacturing will put this country on track to produce roughly 20% of the world’s leading-edge logic chips by the end of the decade,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on February 26, 2024.

“That’s a big deal,” Raimondo added. “Why is that a big deal? Because folks, today we’re at zero.” Her speech came a year after the initiation of funding applications under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act by the US Department of Commerce. With a staggering US$39 billion earmarked for manufacturing incentives, the stage has been set for a transformative journey in the semiconductor landscape. 

US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo speaks during the UK Artificial Intelligence (AI) Safety Summit at Bletchley Park. (Photo by TOBY MELVILLE/POOL/AFP).

Raimondo’s ambitious vision, unveiled concurrently, delineates the path ahead. By 2030, the US aims to spearhead the design and manufacture of cutting-edge chips, establishing dedicated fabrication plant clusters to realize this audacious objective. She claims that, besides everything else, there has been a significant shift in the need for advanced semiconductor chips due to AI. 

“When we started this, generative AI wasn’t even part of our vocabulary. Now, it’s everywhere. Training a single large language model takes tens of thousands of leading-edge semiconductor chips. The truth is that AI will be the defining technology of our generation. You can’t lead in AI if you don’t lead in making leading-edge chips. And so our work in implementing the CHIPS Act became much more important,” Raimondo emphasized.

If the US achieves its goals, it will result in “hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs,” Raimondo said Monday. “The truth of it is the US does lead, right? We do lead. We lead in the design of chips and the development of large AI language models. But we don’t manufacture or package any leading-edge chips that we need to fuel AI and our innovation ecosystem, including chips necessary for national defense. We don’t make it in America, and the brutal fact is the US cannot lead the world as a technology and innovation leader on such a shaky foundation,” she iterated.

Why is there a gap between US and chip manufacturing?

The US grappled with a significant gap in chip manufacturing for several reasons. Firstly, many semiconductor companies outsourced their manufacturing operations overseas to cut costs, leading to a decline in domestic chip production capacity. Secondly, as semiconductor technology advanced, the complexity and cost of building cutting-edge fabrication facilities increased, discouraging investment in new fabs. 

Meanwhile, global competitors like Taiwan, South Korea, and China expanded their semiconductor industries rapidly, intensifying competition. While other countries provided substantial government support to their semiconductor industries, the US fell behind. Then, there were regulatory hurdles, and environmental regulations make building and operating semiconductor fabs in the US challenging and costly. 

A combination of outsourcing, technological challenges, global competition, lack of government support, and regulatory issues contributed to the US’s gap in chip manufacturing, with none of the world’s leading-edge chips being produced domestically.

And then the world woke up one morning in dire need of leading-edge chips to underscore the technology behind the next industrial revolution, and America realized its mistake.

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“We need to make these chips in America. We need more talent development in America. We need more research and development in America and just a lot more manufacturing at scale,” Raimondo said in her speech at CSIS.

2030 vision: prioritizing future-ready projects

US President Joe Biden greets attendees at a TSMC chip manufacturing facility. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI/AFP).

In Raimondo’s speech, she declared that the US will first prioritize projects that will be operational by the end of this decade. “I want to be clear: there are many worthy proposals that we’ve received with plans to come online after 2030, and we’re saying no, for now, to those projects because we want to maximize our impact in this decade,” she clarified.

In short, the US will give way to “excellent projects that could come online this year” instead of granting incentives to projects that will come online in 10 or 12 years from now. She also referred back to the goal mentioned last year – when the US is all said and done with this CHIPS initiative – is to have at least two new large-scale clusters of leading-edge logic fabs, each of those clusters employing thousands of workers. 

“I’m pleased to tell you today we expect to exceed that target,” she claimed. So far, the Commerce Department has awarded grants to three companies in the chip industry as part of the CHIPS Act: BAE Systems, Microchip Technology, and, most recently, a significant US$1.5 billion grant to GlobalFoundries. Additional funding is anticipated for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics as they establish new facilities within the US.

Raimondo also highlighted her nation’s commitment to supporting the production of older-generation chips, referred to as mature-node or legacy chips. “We’re not losing sight of the importance of current generation and mature node chips, which you all know are essential for cars, medical devices, defense systems, and critical infrastructure.”

Yet, the lion’s share of investments, totaling US$28 billion out of US$39 billion, is earmarked for leading-edge chips. Raimondo emphasized that this program aims for targeted investments rather than scattering funds wisely. She disclosed that the department has received over US$70 billion in requests from leading-edge companies alone.

For now, anticipation is high for the Commerce Department’s new round of grant announcements, scheduled to coincide with President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on March 7. Among the expected recipients is TSMC, which is establishing new Arizona facilities.

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The rafts of legislation pertinent to energy supply chains cover issues like greenwashing, First Nation considerations, carbon emissions targets, health and safety, employment practices, and many more, depending on the geography of operations and the extent of supply chains.

But it’s important to note that, state-driven geopolitical measures aside, the majority of the strictures and governance in place are driven by public opinion. The fact that trade strictures and legislation emerge and change slowly in relation to public mood gives companies in the energy sector a significant opportunity to differentiate themselves from competitors proactively.

Source: Achilles Information Ltd

In addition to a competitive edge, of course, compliance with mandatory measures and mature reporting processes mean that operating costs will be significantly lower in the longer term than those organizations still reacting to laws and strictures as they appear.

Establishing forward-looking due diligence concerning an organization’s supply chain makes abiding by the terms of and reporting on current and likely legislation an intelligent investment in existing operations and the company’s future. As the energy sector transitions towards renewables and the size of the sector grows accordingly, hot topics like green metal extraction and forced labor will be reflected more in legislation. The ability to plan, mitigate, and change now presents opportunities.

The key to taking a proactive approach is transparency. The energy sector’s historical basis in fossil fuels means that process opacity must be avoided to ensure public and governmental confidence. That’s not to avoid financial penalties for greenwashing or poor practice but to create an industry with less need for onerous legislation.

Developing a process for due diligence in supply chains in the sector need not require enormous resources. Smaller players in the vertical are as affected by the need for regulatory compliance as the giant multinationals. But, risk reduction can be done without enterprise-scale budgets. TechHQ spoke recently to Adam Whitfield, Head of ESG at Achilles Information Ltd., to talk about how the company’s offering combines technology and human expertise to ensure the veracity of data gathered during due diligence processes.

Adam Whitfield, Head of ESG. Source: Achilles Information Ltd

“In the way supply chain risk management has evolved over the last few years, I think we are unique in the amount of resources that we use to carry out human evaluation of documentation that’s uploaded. A lot more evaluation is done through collection of public information through [web] scraping, for instance. We take that information and then use [human] readers to check it,” said Mr Whitfield.

The human element helps companies ensure that publicly available information in the digital domain is accurate. The nature of the internet means that data may not be complete or up to date, or may skewed by its very volume. A minor yet highly public incident – whether with negative or positive connotations – can be quickly amplified online and obscure the real picture.

“We have around 200 auditors around the world that we’re able to deploy to actually go and visit companies. We visit [and] audit around six and a half thousand companies a year, and so we’re taking information that’s being collected and verified remotely, and then, potentially, we’re going to [the] source to see if a company has policies and procedures in place to look after their staff or to protect the environment and so on. We go and visit the factory, the workshop, the site [and] actually see what’s going on,” Mr Whitfield said.

Using the Achilles platform, suppliers for a company in the sector register and upload relevant information: policies, documents, accreditations, licenses, and certifications. When these expire or are due for renewal, the system will flag the case and surface any contradictions needing manual clarification. That’s an essential feature in making due diligence a constant – it has been considered a process enacted just once, early in a relationship. Continually evaluating the supply chain’s elements ensures long-term compliance and transparency.

With accurate and verified data, companies can monitor their supply chain partners over time, evaluate the bigger picture of the effects of their total operations, and report to stakeholders and, where relevant, to governmental bodies and the public. Ensuring continuous compliance prevents the need for reactive measures and rushed supplier evaluation, increasing the value of partner relationships and allowing for better long-term strategies.

Transparency of supply chain operations means energy and distribution companies insulate themselves from penalties from extant legislation and can better plan and change strategy to comply with new measures coming down the road.

In highly regulated industries such as power generation with stringent targets around resource extraction and carbon emissions, for example, long-term change in operations needs to be reflected by the operations of all supply chain partners. Failure to ensure that third parties comply and adhere to best practices can jeopardize progress towards a company’s own targets.

Source: Achilles Information Ltd

Public perceptions of an energy sector operator can be created by even a tiny cog in the larger machinery of its supply chain. The Achilles solution helps reduce that risk, added Mr Whitfield.

He said: “[Companies are] able to present actual demonstrable evidence and data that they use to report. The public is less concerned because, actually, they’re receiving information that’s been independently validated or verified. […] In the past, companies have produced sustainability reports that have been like wish lists or fictional pieces of work without any kind of evidence to back them up. That’s where you’ve had issues around greenwashing. Whereas actually if you’ve got an organization that’s carrying out an independent verification of their carbon footprint to an ISO standard, and then actually they’re able to report on that.”

An ethical and sustainable supply chain can only be achieved with transparency, accurate data, and verifiable practice. The opportunities that come from a better and more efficient way of managing a supply chain in the sector are an integral part of the change the energy industry is experiencing. To ensure that the systems to achieve that are in place does not need to be a massive resource drain. Its modest costs bring multiple benefits: in compliance, future compliance, public relations, reporting, long-term strategy formulation, and a dozen ancillary areas.

In our next article in this series, we’ll focus on the business benefits accruing directly and indirectly from a proactive and continuous process of due diligence for the sector’s supply chain. But if what you’ve read so far has piqued your interest, head over to the Achilles website to read more.

The post Bring clarity to supply chain risk management with Achilles appeared first on TechHQ.

With Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024 getting underway in Barcelona this week, it’s worth reflecting on one advantage of 5G that often goes under the radar – its positioning prowess. Mobile networks have long had the ability to triangulate user equipment based on signals received from neighboring base stations, but 5G positioning takes this to the next level.

What’s more, while ramping up the accuracy of radio-based positioning typically incurs a cost for users – who may need to install additional hardware – 5G breaks this trend by using existing communications technology to deliver high-resolution location information at a lower price point.

MWC Barcelona 2024 is officially OPEN!!

Don't forget to join the conversation using #MWC24 and #4YFN24 and enjoy the event! pic.twitter.com/uD1vHenuTA

— #MWC24 (@MWCHub) February 26, 2024

Want to know more about 5G positioning? Then MWC 2024 is the place to be.

Thanks to features added to the global wireless standard, 5G networks offer positioning capabilities that can pinpoint connected devices within a 1 m area, and that’s just the beginning. “5G Advanced represents a further development of 5G technology and promises faster data transmission of 20 GBit/s and localization accuracies of 20-30 cm to meet the growing demands of the connected world,” writes the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen).

Applications are numerous and will appeal to industrial users in particular. As Ericsson – a provider of indoor 5G positioning systems – points out, smart manufacturing operators can use real-time location information to specify tool settings. “Tightening wheels and putting on car doors requires different torque curves,” explain Magnus Kristersson and Partha Sarathy – product specialists at the global communications technology firm – in a related blog post. “With indoor 5G positioning, we can automate getting the right torque curve to the right tool while disabling tools that are not in a work cell.”

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Defining 5G in terms of business and enterprise use cases

Qualcomm – a developer of chips for mobile devices – has put together a test bed highlighting its industrial precise positioning capabilities using 5G and complementary technologies. In the demonstration, engineers used 5G positioning augmented with machine learning RF fingerprinting to locate machinery under non-line-of-sight conditions.

The setup has six 5G transmission reception points distributed within the facility, which can follow objects of interest with high precision thanks to the data fusion approach.

On TechHQ, we’ve written about how private 5G networks can be a game-changer for businesses. Firms can use private 5G networks to bring connectivity to locations not readily served by public mobile networks – for example, operations in remote areas. But the benefits don’t have to stop there.

If companies are looking for accurate real-time location services on top of data transmission capabilities then it’s possible that 5G networks could perform both duties, saving on the amount of upfront investment required.

Modern wireless standards such as 5G feature positioning reference signals, which can be received passively by user equipment to help pinpoint devices. It’s also possible to measure round trip time using multiple cells to deliver positioning information. And one of the big breakthroughs is the use of angular based methods that report on the arrival of signals across 5G antenna arrays.

Researchers in Sweden have shown how developments have made it possible to perform vehicular positioning with only a single base station, which shows how car-makers could automate navigation when GPS signals are unavailable.

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Edge computing keeps 5G in the fast lane and on the pulse

Satellite navigation can become unpredictable when relatively weak GPS signals are blocked in dense urban areas. Mass transit systems such as trains can also be disrupted when satellite positioning fails, as their automatic door-opening systems depend on GPS functionality.

The list of potential use cases for 5G positioning is long and includes use cases indoors and outdoors, from asset tracking to emergency rescue. Plus, solutions can be portable – such as the Fraunhofer IIS Nomadic 5G positioning testbed, which the institute has on display at MWC 2024.

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RFID tags and other product identifiers such as barcode labels are useful in keeping track of goods across supply chains, but they have their limitations. You can put an RFID tag or barcode label on the outside of a product or box of supplies, but what about the smaller items inside? Paving the way for many more components to be securely labeled is an anti-counterfeit tag that measures just 2 x 2 mm (about the size of a sesame seed) devised by researchers in the US.

The approach, which was first unveiled in 2020, uses terahertz radiation to read cryptographic codes stored on the tiny chips. Similar to RFID designs, the data transfer process can be powered by energy emitted from the scanner, which means that the anti-counterfeit tag needs no battery and should last for years.

What is terahertz radiation?

Terahertz radiation has been described as light that is almost heat. And the terahertz range of frequencies sits at the far end of the infrared band, adjacent to the microwave band, within the electromagnetic spectrum.

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Not only can these submillimetre waves pass through clothing and plastics to image hidden objects, terahertz radiation can also be used to identify materials in its path based on spectroscopic fingerprints.

Given these properties, it’s no surprise to learn that the terahertz portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is ripe with security scanning applications. What’s more, unlike X-rays, terahertz radiation is non-ionizing – meaning that it won’t damage living cells.

So far, so good, but – as observers have highlighted – the original design of the MIT group’s anti-counterfeit tag shared a security vulnerability common to mainstream technology such as conventional RFID labels. By simply removing the security ID from a genuine product and attaching it to a fake item, counterfeiters would be able to easily defeat the authentication system.

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To combat this, the team has come up with an ingenious solution, which centers on the glue used to attach the anti-counterfeit tag to the host product. Small metallic particles are added to the adhesive during formulation and their final pattern when the tag is deployed is used as a security property.

“These metal particles are essentially like mirrors for terahertz waves. If I spread a bunch of mirror pieces onto a surface and then shine light on that, depending on the orientation, size, and location of those mirrors, I would get a different reflected pattern. But if you peel the chip off and reattach it, you destroy that pattern,” explains Ruonan Han – leader of the Terahertz Integrated Electronics Group.

The team is presenting its latest design at the 2024 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), which is taking place this week in San Francisco, CA. To incorporate the new security feature, users would take a reading of the anti-counterfeit tag when it was first attached to an item and then use that pattern data for verification.

Collaborating with colleagues at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the researchers have shown how a machine learning model can be trained to match glue patterns with more than 99 percent accuracy.

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The MIT project is by no means the only effort to secure supply chains. Quantum Base – a spin-out from Lancaster University in the UK – uses nanoscale quantum physical unclonable functions to assert that labeled goods are authentic. The anti-counterfeit solution is said to be impossible to copy, clone or fake and authenticates in seconds using a regular smartphone.

As Quantum Base points out, there are multiple reasons why firms would want to invest in anti-counterfeit tag technology. Companies that are unable to validate critical elements of their supply chain put their reputation at risk and expose themselves to substandard products.

The firm’s solution is based on carbon nanomaterials that – when applied to surfaces – can be used to generate security fingerprints, which are reported to be more unique than DNA.

The post Sesame seed-sized, anti-counterfeit tag gets smart glue upgrade appeared first on TechHQ.

• Where in the world can you get the highest tech salary?
• Why are some traditional bastions of high salary tech roles falling by the wayside?
• Australia – a case study of innovation.

Despite job shortage squeezes, a tech salary is highly sought because, at the risk of seeming grubby, tech saaries are traditionally high compared to salaries in “non-tech” industries. In the US, big tech means big money and that’s partly what keeps computer science classes populated. Luckily, global demand for engineers isn’t dropping, according to staffing service firm Human Resocia.

But in Japan, for instance,  IT engineers were only paid, on average, $36,061 in 2023. That figure sees Japan drop six places in worldwide rankings and come in at 26 out of 72 companies for best tech sector salary.

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“Even disregarding the effects of a weak yen, (Japan’s) competitiveness is receding when looking at salaries,” a member of the research team said. “There are concerns that Japan is becoming a less attractive destination.”

Switzerland was top of the charts, with an average salary of $102,839 followed by the US where the average tech sector salary is $92,378.

Pay for IT workers in Japan rose only 0.4% compared to the last year, which is a miniscule amount – especially when the US saw growth of 3.6% and China jumped 16.9%.

The number of people employed in IT across 109 countries analyzed by Human Resocia rose by an estimated 26.81 million, up 13.3% from the previous year. The largest growth happened in the US, where 4.45 million people were added to the workforce.

India’s IT workforce grew by 3.34 million people and China 3.28 million. Despite unfavorable wages, Japan’s staff growth was ranked 4^th, increasing by 1.44 million.

Japan, alongside the UK, entered a recession last week. Although previously a giant in the technology sector, it has been flagging.

That doesn’t mean the government isn’t trying. It plans to spend as much as ¥45 billion ($300 million) to back a research group developing chip technology – another step in a national push to catch up in semiconductor manufacturing.

Of course, Japan isn’t so much establishing ground in the chip market as reclaiming it. In 1988, Japanese firms accounted for 51% of chip sales worldwide. So what went wrong? Does the hardly competitive salary mean that the best Japanese engineers are leaving the country and putting their skills towards technological advance elsewhere?

Australian tech sector hard to enter

For years now Australia has been unable to train enough IT professionals to fill local requirements. Visas for skilled workers from offshore have been the solution so far, but the process is about to change.

By design, getting a work visa for Australia is complicated: you have to convince an “assessing authority” you’ve got the educational achievements and skills that Australia needs. For tech sector professionals, only one organization is a certified assessor – the Australian Computer Society (ACS).

The process for applicants hoping to work in the technology sector involves filling in a PDF. Sounds simple, but according to the ACS chief growth officer, Siobhan O’Sullivan, it results in 80% of applications arriving in an unfit state to be assessed.

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The complexity of the form – particularly tricky for those who don’t speak English as a first language – means that often, they’re submitted incomplete, omitting important documents or information.

More than half of applicants submit two forms, because another requirement to score a visa is to demonstrate that skills match the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO). More than 20 such ANZSCO codes apply to tech jobs. Applicants therefore submit multiple applications in the hope their skills match at least one ANZSCO code.

In an effort to make the application process simpler, O’Sullivan said it should offer an experience akin to that of consumer-facing apps like food delivery services. That would also cut down the ACS processing time; the organization finds itself with thousands of unprocessed applications and a response time of up to 14 weeks.

Next month, a new, interactive web form will be introduced. Identity documents will be sent to a third party for verification, meaning the ACS will no longer store them. It will also access assessments using an API instead of storing and securing sensitive personal information.

Another major change is that applicants will be able to specify three ANSZCO codes in one application.

All of this comes at a price, though: the cost of an application has more than doubled. Still, the argument is, current applicants are having to fill out multiple forms at around AU$550 ($360) apiece. The new fee, standing at AU$1100 ($720) will thus be cheaper overall.

Australia has emerged as a global technology powerhouse, and despite being affected by global technology layoffs, the country is arguably better off than Japan as a prospect for those looking for a high tech salary right now.

The post Where to work in tech around the world appeared first on TechHQ.

Multiple outside factors affect any company with significant investment in their supply chain and logistics operations, even before internal practices are considered. Extra red tape at Britain’s borders, continuing US port congestion and trade disruptions in the Red Sea are testament to that. A supply chain comprises many actors, so it’s almost impossible to shield the effects of even a small disruption from an individual business.

Source: Zebra Technologies

Supply chain, warehousing, distribution, and logistics functions, therefore, tend to be run by long-term planners. By proactively monitoring and improving aspects of operations within their control, the company buys itself as much protection as it can against local or world events that could occur tomorrow, or many years in the future.

There are multiple ways in which problems closer to home can be addressed and methods combating them attenuated. Staff ‘turnover’ in warehouses, distribution depots, and logistics, for example, brings their own considerable costs, exacerbated by chronic labor shortages in the sector. Employee well-being and job satisfaction – the employee experience (EX) – are high on the list of desired outcomes among decision-makers, as are worker productivity and automation. In some cases, EX, productivity, and robotized processes are interconnected; staff with dull, repetitive jobs can be re-tasked to more interesting and fulfilling roles once even basic technology and automated systems are in place.

Better operational practices not only reduce costs in the mid to long term but also help ensure that the company itself causes a minimum of supply chain disruption both up and downstream. This, in turn, lowers prices on the table from supply chain partners and creates greater trust among third parties with whom the company works.

Source: Zebra Technologies

Those with significant resources set the bar high for others to follow. The practices of Amazon, Temu, and state-owned GEODIS, for example, have been able to instigate top-down approaches to operational overhauls, with some becoming household name brands by dint of their efforts. Yet there is no direct correlation between the resources plowed into restructuring operations and 100 percent positive outcomes. Discrete projects can bring the types of resilience and efficiency to more modest transport, logistics, and distribution companies that create significant cost reductions. That’s partly down to the knock-on positive effects that flow from relatively minor changes.

Light at the tunnel’s end

Founded in 1981, UK retailer The Works decided to give autonomy to its individual shops and online store, supplying employees with the technology to monitor and run their own stock control processes. Data gathered fed back to automated systems in the company’s supply chain, slashing surpluses and ensuring stock availability, where and when it was needed.

Simple-to-use devices with familiar user interfaces ensured employee buy-in and the complexity of the data collated country-wide was handled by automated software. This instigated more efficient logistics and distribution, plus informed warehouse operations, creating cost savings and increased customer satisfaction at the point of service.

The data ingestion and business-led optimization of operations are particularly effective in supply chains, where the consequences of even small changes tend to ripple out into other parts of the business. That’s led larger organizations to invest in expensive re-architecting of enterprise-level ERP systems.

Source: Zebra Technologies

But specialist software designed and deployed solely in supply chain, T&L, distribution, and warehousing businesses have particularly attractive offerings. From users equipped with environmentally-tuned devices^* to controlling software and analytics, industry-specific vendors are in an excellent position to help customers refine their operations across the board.

^* (Cold room-suitable tablets, forklift-mounted tech, long-distance barcode scanners, etc.)

While no single solution is a sure fit for every organization, a sector specialist will already have many of the answers to problems that are sadly not unique to any one business. With the addition of consultation, advice, partnership, and long-term device and software support, companies with significant supply chains have much to gain from sector-specific vendors.

Conclusions

Many of the issues this article touches on are further explored in the Zebra Warehousing Vision Study, which examines many of the pain points of operations in the sector and suggests solutions for automation and technology deployment that make business sense.

Any transformational journey takes time and study to achieve, but some systems are particular to this complex vertical. Getting guidance as part of a longer-term partnership is also highly recommended. What might seem an intractable problem in your organization’s operations may well have, if not immediate solutions, but a range of options. Sometimes, it takes a specialist to bring them to the surface.

To refine your operational strategies to help develop immunity from the effects of global supply chain issues, improve EX, and cut operating costs in some surprising areas, read the Vision Study via this link.

To talk to an expert in the industry about how technology, hardware, and automation can help your business scale, reach out to a representative.

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