MIT Supply Chain Frontiers

In recent years, online education has come to the forefront as an alternative to traditional education programs. Its increasing prominence reflects its adaptability, flexibility, affordability, and far-reaching scale. As the global workforce stands to undergo significant changes in the next 5-10 years due to digitalization, advancements in AI, and automation, employers are increasingly valuing skills over degrees. For workers, this...

In this episode we sit down with Dr. Matthias Winkenbach, Director of Research at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics, Alejandro González, Software Business Unit Director at Mecalux, and Iñaki Fernández, Chief Technology Officer at Mecalux.

Mecalux, a provider of warehouse management solutions, is a founding research partner of the new MIT Intelligent Logistics Systems Lab, which is at the forefront of advancing logis...

Vehicle routing is one of the most well-understood, extensively studied problems in both history and academia—it's been studied by academics since the early 1800s. Yet 200 years later, optimal efficiency remains just out of reach. And given the enormous increase in pressure for consumer expectations in recent years, that remaining "last mile" of vehicle routing  efficiency could, on a global scale, make a huge difference to a huge ...

In this episode, we sit down with members of the MIT Low Income Firms Transformation (LIFT) Lab: Director Josué Velázquez Martínez, Postdoctoral Researcher Sreedevi Rajagopalan, and Doctoral Student Fabio Castro.

We discuss the LIFT Lab's work empowering micro-retailers and nanostores in emerging markets to lift themselves out of poverty. These retailers, while making up an overwhelming majority of retail business in their regions,...

Warehouses are undergoing a fundamental transformation—in response to the explosion of growth in the e-commerce space and worldwide large-scale supply chain disruptions, warehouses have gone from places simply for goods to sit to highly interconnected, automated hubs of activity. Warehouses of the future leverage new technologies in automation and digitalization to enhance precision, flexibility, and efficiency to adapt quickly to ...

On this episode, we're joined by Melanie Nuce-Hilton, SVP for Innovation and Partnerships at GS1 US, a nonprofit standards organization best known for administering the Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode—and celebrating its fiftieth anniversary right around the same time as MIT CTL. Melanie talks all about the history of supply chain standards over the last 50 years, including the UPC barcode, RFID, and others. And she also discu...

MIT CTL Research Scientist David Correll joins us to share findings from the State of Supply Chain Sustainability 2023. Pressure on firms to make their supply chains more sustainable has increased over the past four years and isn't going anywhere, though the distinct areas of sustainability on which that pressure focuses are constantly changing. Indeed, sustainability is complex and contains multitudes. The report also takes a look...

In this episode, MIT CTL Director Yossi Sheffi, an expert with nearly five decades of experience in the supply chain and logistics areas, sits down with Susan Lacefield, Executive Editor of Supply Chain Quarterly. Yossi and Susan discuss the miracle of modern global supply chains—a magic conveyor belt that moves goods from mines and forests to supermarket shelves. They also discuss supply chain resilience in the face of major disru...

In this episode, we are joined by Kathy Fulton, Executive Director of the American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN), who discusses her work connecting private-sector resources with disaster response needs: a "gray sky" response, after a disaster hits. For instance, if a supplier has excess food they need to offload, ALAN will connect them with a warehouse with the capacity to accept the delivery. ALAN forges p...

In the wake of a disaster, restoring supply chains can be critical in assuring that the most vital needs of affected communities are met.

In this episode, Tim Russell and Lauren Finegan of the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab discuss the fundamentals of humanitarian logistics and disaster response—including how to best build resilient communities, how the public and private sectors can work together for optimal disaster response, ...

Supply chain design has traditionally been conducted with only one dimension in mind: cost minimization. The conventions of supply chain design date largely from the 1990s. But major technological strides have been made in the years since, allowing for much more complex considerations to be taken into account. So most companies, by using this obsolete approach, are putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Today's episode f...

Truckload transportation services procurement is costly and time-intensive. These months-long procurement events typically result in thousands of contracts between shippers and carriers. The contracts cover each of the shipper’s product distribution lanes or origin-destination pairs.

Due to truckload supply and demand uncertainty, shippers often adopt a coverage strategy to secure contracted capacity on combinations of lanes to mee...

This episode marks the second installment of research scientist David Correll speaking with the 2021–22 MIT CTL military fellows: US Army Col. Joe Parker, Lt. Col. Brian Young, and Louisiana National Guard Lt. Col. Stephen J. Luebbert.

Today’s conversation is all about empathetic leadership. Parker, Young, and Luebbert discuss how leading teams in high-stress environments like military combat requires empathy and humility. They rev...

In today’s episode, research scientist David Correll speaks with the 2021–22 MIT CTL military fellows: US Army Col. Joe Parker, Lt. Col. Brian Young, and Louisiana National Guard Lt. Col. Stephen J. Luebbert. The fellows discussed their experiences in the military and the MIT SCM program.

For written and downloadable transcripts visit ctl.mit.edu

Their conversation explores the differences and similarit...

Join MIT Global SCALE Connect for an in-depth conversation with Paul Granadillo, SVP Global Supply Chain at Moderna. MIT Professor Yossi Sheffi speaks with Paul about how the pandemic vaccine response reshaped manufacturing, business, and supply chains at Moderna.

Mr. Granadillo shares his professional experiences learned from joining the company during a time of growth. He describes some of the methods Moderna uses to meet its log...

Bottleneck analysis aiming to increase asset productivity has commonly been applied inside the four walls of production and distribution facilities. The pandemic disrupted global supply chains with dramatic shifts in demand and constraints in supply with cascading effects. Shippers then dynamically shifted traditional origin-destination patterns causing stress on the networks of logistics service providers. 

As a result, bottleneck...

Earlier this year, MIT CTL's David Correll spoke with over-the-road truckers about their experiences in order to shed light on why it is that U.S. truckers appear to be both scarce and underutilized at the same time. 

During the year, Dr. Correll oversaw three MIT SCM master's capstones that addressed truck driver utilization and retention in contrast to shipper and receiver policies and practices. These were completed as part of t...

The MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics (MIT CTL) and Amazon engaged with a global community of researchers across a range of disciplines, from computer science to business operations, to supply chain management, challenging them to build data-driven route optimization models leveraging massive historical route execution data and machine learning models.

While we congratulated the winning teams and all participants in the new...

Today, on MIT Supply Chain Frontiers, editorial director, Ken Cottrill speaks with Maria Jesus Sáenz, director of MIT Digital Supply Chain Transformation Lab, about how companies use artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify key performance and key learning indicators during digital transformations.

Sáenz shares examples of how companies may use AI and ML to collaborate on data models and leverage publicly available ...