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Which university and certification programs reliably turn out strong supply chain talent? A list released by SCM World, a U.K.-based organization for supply chain practitioners, includes some familiar names as well as a few surprises.

The rankings are based on responses from 331 participants in the group’s 2013 Chief Supply Chain Officer survey. Respondents were asked to name the three professional certifications they deem “most valuable” as markers of supply chain talent, as well as the three universities and business schools they believe are “most valuable” for turning out supply chain talent.

Respondents’ picks included well-known U.S. and European supply chain degree programs, such as those at Michigan State, Penn State, Cranfield, the University of Tennessee, and Georgia Tech. It also included schools like Harvard and Stanford, which do not award supply chain degrees—but do turn out highly sought-after M.B.A.s.

The top professional certification programs included those offered by APICS, the Supply Chain Council, the Institute for Supply Management, the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, and the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply. The surprises in that category: Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP), a certification most often associated with perishable product quality control, and Certified Management Accountant (CMA), awarded by the Institute of Management Accountants.

One takeaway from this varied list, said Kevin O’Marah, SCM World’s chief
content officer, is that “business wants cross-functional supply chain knowledge
rather than narrow technical skills.”
The complete list is available at www.scmworld.com/Blog/Beyond-Supply-
Chain/SCM-World-Top-25--Leaders-in-Learning/.

Where to find supply chain talent

Here’s our latest roundup of charitable work by companies in the logistics and material handling space:

b Toyota Material Handling, U.S.A.,

Inc. (TMHU) and local dealer Toyota
Material Handling Northeast donated the
use of four 8-Series pneumatic lift trucks
and one walkie pallet truck to help unload
more than 35 tons of nonperishable food
for distribution by the Philadelphia-area
hunger relief organization Philabundance.
b The South Carolina Ports Authority (SCPA) has received the S.C. Department
of Health and Environmental Control’s “Spare the Air” Award for reducing
port-related pollutants by 50 percent since 2005. SCPA says it achieved that mile-
stone thanks to its “Clean Truck” program, equipment modernization, improved
terminal productivity, collaboration with local and state organizations to promote
air-quality improvements, and diversification of inland transportation to lessen
environmental impacts.

b Santa Fe Springs, Calif.-based Shift Freight, which provides less-than-truckload service to third-party logistics companies, is donating $1 to qualified charitable organizations for every shipment it moves for its customers. Under its “SHIFT the World” program, customers can dedicate individual shipments to their favorite charities.

Good deeds of the month

When it comes to Guinness World Records, most of us don’t think of logistics-re-lated achievements. But it turns out, the curator of records on everything from the greatest athletic feats to the world’s largest pizza has a category that’s right up our alley: fastest bar-code scanning.

The new scanning champion is Digimarc, which unveiled a unique digi-tal-watermark bar code at the 2014 National Retail Federation convention in New York. Using the new bar code and Datalogic ADC’s Magellan 9800i multiplane image scanner, two Digimarc executives set a new world record for scanning and bagging 50 grocery items. With a Guinness adjudicator observing closely, the team correctly scanned and bagged all 50 items in 48. 15 seconds— easily beating the previous record of 75 seconds.

Digimarc’s new technology allows an imperceptible pattern to be embedded into the images on printed consumer packaged goods, and in some cases, into the packaging material itself. The company says the bar code contains the same global trade identification number (GTIN) data as the corresponding universal product code (UPC). The data are invisibly repeated over the package’s entire surface, eliminating the need to find and position the bar code toward the reader.