As a sourcing or procurement manager, you may think there’s nothing new about supplier collaboration. Your chief procurement officer (CPO) most likely disagrees.

Current logistics and supply chain management trends are discussed very often on social media sites. How can we identify them really? This article will show you some trends in the past and reveal what the future holds.

Background
Expert opinions appear to be the most important source of information for a trend prediction. In the year 2000, Journal of Business Logistics published the article named "Ten Mega-Trends That Will Revolutionize Supply Chain Logistics". The authors of this article are the late Donald Bowersox, David Closs and Theodore Stank (at that time all of them were at Michigan State University). The purpose of this article was to identify the paradigm shifts the authors observed from the way leading companies transformed their supply chain capabilities which were the results of the change of information technology. Ten megatrends can be summarized as below,

1) the shift from customer service to relationship management
2) more collaborative behavior
3) demand sharing creates the higher level of a joint business planning
4) new business environment requires a rapid change in processes and practices
5) focus on the bottom-line changes to focus on the value creation
6) internal functions are more integrated
7) virtual integration replaces the vertical integration
8) companies share more information with trading partners
9) multi-skilled employees are required
10) economic value added concept are more prevalent

Some of these trends have become the realities, depending on where you are in the supply chain.

What's Next?
Since the technologies change faster than ever and the scope of supply chain management is expanding, it's absolutely important for supply chain practitioners to capture the trends from the overall business landscape. In order to achieve this objective, we conduct a literature review and find an interesting article named "Agent of Change: the Future of Technology Disruption in Business" published by Intelligence Unit of "The Economist" in 2012. It's the result of a global survey of more than 500 executives conducted in 2011 + a series of in-depth interviews with thinkers from various industries about the future and business model in the year 2020. More details can be found as below,

Is time management important to your business and your life? This article will show you 10 best time management books that get the attentions of leading CEOs.

Supply Chain Opz conducted a survey with CEOs to learn more about their favorite time management books.  

Here's a list of some of the top CEOs' favorite books to help you structure your time better and be more productive.

In this article, originally published on Supply Chain Opz, Professor Burcu Keskin from University of Alabama will share 7 supply chain trends that working professionals should watch.

As pressure to improve supply chain cost performance increases for many companies, the evaluation and selection of competent suppliers becomes a key concern. Typically, total cost, quality, and delivery performance appear as critical factors in the supplier selection process. However, complex supplier relationships, unreliable sources of material supply, and ever-increasing customer expectations greatly add to the expectations to select the best suppliers and conduct their operations more efficiently.

In this article, we will show you a list of operations management book that inspires world's leading business leaders from Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and more.  

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made an official statement on June 16th, 2016 that partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs) are no longer “generally recognized as safe” or GRAS for use in human food.

This will mean a lot to food manufacturers and restaurants. At a very basic level, all food ingredients must be GRAS to be used in food production, which means that all producers will need to transition to other alternative healthier fats.

This statement comes as a result of their many years of findings on trans fats, a type of fat commonly found in partially hydrogenated oils. 

The harvest and production of olive oil can be a mystical thing — it’s something that’s done in a far off country (often the Mediterranean or South America) and you can’t get the inside look that you want to.

We all want to stand in the fields while the olives are being harvested, brought to the mill and turned into olive oil. Of course we do! It’s a fascinating process.

If you’re you’re curious about the olive oil production process, these three videos will give you an inside look at the harvesting, production and pressing process. To top it off, some of these shots are absolutely beautiful, and will inspire you to want to use olive oil, if you’re not using it already!

Whole Foods is an anomaly.  

On the one hand, they’re a $12.9 billion company.

On the other hand, they shun traditional marketing and advertising. (Oh, except for that little “Values Matter” campaign they launched, which was estimated to cost $15-20 million!)

The big question on many marketers’ minds is: Did the Values Matter campaign work, or was it a colossal waste of money?

Furthermore, will Whole Foods’ resistance to traditional marketing put their long-term fate in jeopardy?

I reached out to Joe Dobrow, who was head of marketing at Whole Foods in the late 1990s, to get his insights on the matter. In October 2014 Joe published an excellent article detailing “several inherent flaws” in the Values Matter campaign.

In the following interview, Joe shares his thoughts on why Whole Foods has been so successful, how they could have improved the Values Matter campaign, and what it was like being in charge of marketing at Whole Foods.

If you're selling organic products, it's important to undersand why your customers want to buy organic in the first place.  This information will help you market and sell your products even better.

Don't assume that if you eat organic foods, that every consumer has the same reasons for buying organic as you do.  Healthy living, pesticide avoidance, hormone avoidance, a strong environment, a thriving economy, and lots of other reasons can all tie into their decision to buy organic.

If you're selling an organic product, you'll need to understand all the possible reasons that cosnumers buy organic and decide which relate to your business how you want to use them to market and sell your products.

Have you ever wondered what a group full of olive oil suppliers say when you’re not in the room? 

Or how we understand the weight of our own responsibility, as suppliers, to you — our customers?

Or how we look at the food industry in today’s market?

A few weeks ago, Centra Foods was asked to give a talk on “olive oil used in manufacturing” at the North American Olive Oil Association conference. What did we say to this request? Yes, of course! And today I’m sharing an insider’s look at that industry presentation with you. 

The organic industry is steadily growing, and organic foods are holding more and more appeal to consumers that are already buying natural, non-gmo or whole foods.

There’s many different reasons that consumers choose to buy organic, and they have a wide range from personal health matters to much larger scale reasons like ecosystem or water preservation.

If you’re selling organic products (or thinking about developing a new organic or clean product line) it’s important to understand all of the different possible reasons that consumers would choose organic foods over other options that are both cheaper and more readily available.

This market research will help you connect with your consumer and ultimately be more successful at selling your brand.

Want to help build your company? Be a good leader? Leave a legacy in your wake?

Of course you do. We all do.

There’s functional skills that every leader needs to have to be successful. But what about the stuff deep down? You know when you meet a person and you think — they are clearly a born leader. Ever wonder what the basic, god-given personality traits are that make up that person? What makes leading so natural for them?

In his book The Intangibles of Leadership, Richard Davis argues that a person with an entire toolkit of learned “functional leadership” skills can still fail if they don’t possess the most important intangible personality traits.

On the flip side, those ingrained with the most important intangible traits will always be able to learn the necessary functional skills to be a leader. So at the end of the day, to lead, you have to have these intangibles.

Think there's room for your business in the natural food industry?  The short answer is yes.

All numbers show that consumer preference towards natural and organic foods is up.  There is both a large and fast growing consumer market for your products.  

But to be able to make educated business decisions, you'll need more specific data than that.  You'll need information on the consumer market in detail; understanding where the opportunities are and what specific target markets are growing can help you understand how you want to develop, position and market your healthy products.

“You work in food? How unusual and fun!”

People tell me this all the time. Of course, they’re absolutely right. And I bet you agree with me too.

If you’ve ever worked in the food manufacturing industry, you’ll agree that there’s a lot of reasons to enjoy your job. It’s both what you do on a daily basis, and the overall purpose that you find in your career.

Here’s all of the best reasons why the food industry is awesome — and why it makes a great career choice.