DC Velocity - January 2014

4 DC VELOCITY JANUARY 2014 www.dcvelocity.com inbound

Know someone who is making a difference in the world of logistics? Then consider nominating him or her as one of DC VELOCITY’S “Rainmakers”—professionals from all facets of the business whose achievements set them apart from the crowd. In the past, our Rainmakers have included practitioners, consultants, academics, vendors, professional association directors, and even military commanders.

To identify these Rainmakers, DC VELOCITY’S editorial directors work with members of the magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board. The nomination process begins in January and concludes in April with a vote to determine which nominees will be invited to become Rainmakers. The 2014 Rainmakers will be unveiled in our July issue.

If you’d like to nominate someone, please send an e-mail outlining your nominee’s accomplishments by Feb. 14 to Editorial Director Peter Bradley at peter@dcvelocity.com. ;

Do you know a Rainmaker?

Amazon.com’s plans to use remote-controlled drones to deliver packages to consumers dominated the news for a few days after company founder Jeff Bezos revealed the scheme in a “ 60 Minutes” interview. But, as our defense logistics expert Steve Geary points out in a blog post, Amazon is well behind the curve: The U.S. Marines have been using drones to make deliveries for some time now.

As Geary noted in a Dec. 8 post at
http://blogs.dcvelocity.com/defense, “The
Marines have flown unmanned cargo heli-
copters for the past year and a half in
Afghanistan, completing about 1,300 mis-
sions. The Marines’ K-MAX unmanned hel-
icopter … flies resupply missions to combat
outposts in Southwest Afghanistan, and it
does it to keep our sons and daughters out of
harm’s way.”
According to Geary, the Marine Corps ver-
sion of a delivery drone can carry up to
6,000 pounds of cargo and reportedly has a
range of about 500 miles.

Amazon is not even the first to deploy drones for consumer deliveries. According to news reports, China’s Shunfeng Express is experimenting with drones for package delivery. And in Australia, a textbook-rental startup called Zookal says it will begin using drones for deliveries in Sydney in 2014. Customers will be able to track a drone’s progress via a smartphone app; the drones hover overhead and lower their loads at a command from a customer’s phone.

Regulations controlling the movements of unmanned flying vehicles will have to be amended or updated before any of the companies can make commercial deliveries. ;

Delivery drones?
Amazon’s late to the party

Supply chain professionals from 34 countries marked the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals’ 50th anniversary by attending CSCMP’s Annual Global Conference in October. Many presenters made note of what has changed during the past 50 years as well as what has remained the same. This year’s Distinguished Service Award winner, Abré Pienaar, probably put it best when he reflected that during that time, the questions have mostly stayed the same: How do we get the right product to the right customer at the right time? How do we collaborate better with partners? The answers to those questions, however, change every year, he said.

That theme of “the changing right answer” also featured prominently in the opening keynote presentation by Felipe Calderón, president of Mexico from 2006 to 2012. Calderón spoke about lessons that could be learned from the way his country handled the 2008–2010 recession. When the recession hit, Mexico increased public spending to 3 percent of its gross domestic product and expanded its social programs. But once the economy started to recover, the right answer to the question of how to help the economy changed. Mexico responded by developing an “exit strategy,” which largely reversed those previous actions, he said.

In the keynote address for the second day, Peter Carlsson, vice president of supply chain for Tesla Motors, talked about Tesla’s quest to challenge conventional wisdom about automobile manufacturing. The company has focused on creating a completely new supply chain that combines the best of Detroit and Silicon Valley, Carlsson said. For example, Tesla has a goal of significantly reducing tooling leadtimes, in the same way that the consumer electronics industry was able to reduce its tooling times to just three or four weeks from as long as four months.

To find next year’s right answers to longstanding questions, mark your calendar for the 2014 Annual Global Conference, which takes place Sept. 21–24 in San Antonio. For more information, go to cscmp.org. ; New answers to age-old