Articles

Warnings from government this week of queues of 7,000 trucks in Kent and 48-hour delays at Dover, have sent shivers down the spines of logistics and supply chain managers operating to ‘just in time’ principles.

"The global supply chain has been significantly impacted by COVID-19," according to Michael Wilson, vice president of marketing and packaging at AFFLINK, the sales and marketing organisation for distributors in the US.

Aside from being a traumatic time for all, COVID-19 has changed the trajectory of the world. For one, before the pandemic, it had finally seemed possible to imagine a future without plastic. But, with a global pandemic on our hands, there’s been a need for rigid sanitation and some rapid adaptations to our daily life. With this, our plastic usage has been creeping back up.

By Ed Smith,freelance writer

Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, you may have read that offline marketing channels such as billboards had seen a significant spike in demand over the last few years.

Covid-19 has placed global supply chains under unprecedented levels of disruption and uncertainty. From consumers’ stock-piling commodities that left supermarket shelves empty, to supply issues of healthcare Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), the Supply Chain has never been under the spotlight so much as it gains new found respect.

A new study from Juniper Research has found that mobile ticketing transaction volume, including tickets purchased via contactless, in-app, and mobile messaging, will recover to pre-pandemic 2019 levels by 2022.

As online grocers report a spike in orders and shoppers post pictures of newly emptied shelves, ParcelHero says we must all learn the lessons of March and avoid panic-buying ahead of a second coronavirus wave. It also warns pandemic profiteers, who buy cleaning products now to sell at a higher price during lockdown, won’t get away with it a second time.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) retail figures for August show that the retail bounce-back has stumbled, says the home delivery expert ParcelHero. The value of all retail sales grew by just 0.7% in August - not the significant recovery stores had been hoping for and a marked slowdown from July’s 4.4% jump.

Cybersecurity expert CrowdStrike has released its CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch 2020 Threat Hunting Report which reveals the company has stopped 41,000 potential intrusions in the first half of 2020, compared to the 35,000 it saw in the whole of 2019.

The rise of e-commerce has brought about significant disruption to traditional logistics activities, demanding constant adjustment to best meet changing demand. Similar adaptability is vital in intralogistics to ensure orders are processed and fulfilled effectively. In this article, Stephen Hayes, managing director of Beckhoff UK, explains how to establish scalable, adaptable intralogistics activity from the warehouse floor up.