I am a student, and I've been working on an idea in this space. I was talking to someone with a lot of international experience today, and they told me flatly that this is a non-problem. I thought the lack of a shared language would make meetings difficult, but his argument was that whoever has the best English does the talking, everyone else adapts, and it works fine.

I have no way to know if that's true, so I'm asking people who actually sit in these calls.

When you're on a call with a supplier or partner and the shared language is weak:

- Does one person on each side carry the whole meeting?

- What happens with slides, drawings, or spec sheets on screen - does everyone actually read them, or do they get sent over and translated afterwards? Or are they translated before hand?

- Does your company pay for anything to deal with this - interpreter, a specific meeting tool, someone internal who does translation on the side?

I am happy to hear the honest harsh truth.

Im comparing injection molding companies for a 700 pc first run of glass filled nylon mounting brackets with molded standoffs, ribs, and one snap tab. GPT brought up Quickparts, Fathom and Protolabs. Dont really need it rushed and want to get it right so main thing is making sure rtheres good communication before production starts. Who do you trust for first runs?

Global port congestion has reportedly reached approximately 4.3 million TEUs of delayed vessel capacity, surpassing the four-million-TEU peak recorded during COVID

Much of the current disruption is concentrated in North Asia, where consecutive typhoons have affected Shanghai, Ningbo and other major Chinese ports. Some vessels are reportedly waiting six to eleven days, creating late departures, changing ETAs, rolled containers and port omissions.

Ocean congestion gets most of the attention, but the disruption doesn’t end when the container reaches the United States. Delayed vessels often arrive in clusters, releasing large amounts of freight into ports, transload facilities and warehouses at the same time.

That can create downstream pressure on domestic transportation, including:

• Reduced drayage and chassis availability
• Congested transload and distribution facilities
• Tightening California outbound truckload capacity
• Short-notice FTL requests when containers finally become available
• Increased demand for LTL shipments after containers are broken down
• Missed pickup and delivery appointments
• Longer warehouse dwell times
• Detention, storage and redelivery charges
• Less predictable FTL and LTL pricing

For importers, wholesalers and distributors, one delayed container can quickly become dozens of urgent domestic shipments. If the inbound freight misses its planned receiving window, the warehouse may need to reschedule labor, customers may need expedited deliveries, and shipments originally planned as economical LTL can turn into partial or full truckloads.

A few ways were preparing:

1. Build additional time into both the ocean and domestic portions of the shipment.
2. Avoid booking the final truck solely around the vessel’s original ETA.
3. Monitor vessel location, terminal availability and actual container release.
4. Give FTL and LTL providers advance notice, even when the pickup date is not finalized.
5. Prepare pallet counts, dimensions, weights, freight classes and delivery requirements before the container is unloaded.
6. Confirm whether deliveries require appointments, liftgates or limited-access service.
7. Compare the cost of LTL, volume LTL, partial truckload and FTL before automatically selecting one mode.
8. Establish backup capacity for important California outbound lanes.
9. Keep customers updated with realistic delivery windows rather than best-case ETAs.

The biggest mistake we see is treating the ocean shipment, drayage, transload and final delivery as separate moves. When those pieces aren’t coordinated, a delay at the port can create avoidable costs across the entire shipment.

For those currently handling imported freight:

Are you seeing port congestion affect your domestic FTL or LTL operations yet? Where is the biggest problem drayage, warehouse availability, truck capacity, LTL service or unpredictable delivery dates?

I’m especially interested in what shippers and carriers are seeing around Los Angeles/Long Beach and California outbound freight.

​

Im comparing injection molding companies for a 700 pc first run of glass filled nylon mounting brackets with molded standoffs, ribs, and one snap tab. GPT brought up Quickparts, Fathom and Protolabs. Dont really need it rushed and want to get it right so main thing is making sure rtheres good communication before production starts. Who do you trust for first runs?

Hi,

I have been researching the advanced supply chains of the top 1% companies like Walmart, Nestle etc. And I genuinely don't find anything that can be solved using tech or AI that solves a massive financial pain. Not good to have technologies but something that actually is a pain point. I can't believe that top supply chains are already so advanced that there is no scope of an emergence of a new startup in any gap? Or am I wrong?

I really want to understand the problems that big corporations would pay for!

Thanks for your answers in advance!

Our problem: an item stocked out 80 days of a 90-day window looks like near-zero demand to any naive average, so the reorder suggestion stays low and it stays out of stock. The fix was to count demand only over the days it was actually available — rebuild the daily on-hand balance from stock movements, and treat out-of-stock days as missing data rather than zero sales.

Below ~30% non-zero days we switch to Croston-SBA, above it damped Holt, plus a same-quarter-last-year seasonality factor. Wrote it up here: https://aiku.io/blog/stop-pretending-you-are-forecasting

Curious what others do — do you censor stockout days, or just override by hand?

Is supply chain or procurement a rewarding career for "Engineers"

You can find an answer to this question in this podcast, featuring a fellow engineer Janice Marquardt & very successful entrepreneur Marc Kloepfel, who started and exited a procurement consulting practice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWawdh2uMKk

I’ve been watching several videos about Supply Chain Management and Logistics because I’m considering changing my career path. My background is in Graphic Design, but I don’t think I want to work in graphic design for the rest of my life.
The thing is, I have absolutely no background in logistics or supply chain management, so I’m not sure what the best path would be for me. I’m considering either getting a Bachelor’s degree in Supply Chain Management/Logistics or doing a Master’s degree, but I’m not sure if a Master’s would be appropriate since I don’t have a Bachelor’s in a related field

For someone in my situation:
-Would it make more sense to get a Bachelor’s degree in Supply Chain Management first, or could I go directly into a Master’s?
- Is a Master’s in Supply Chain Management manageable for someone who has never studied logistics before?
- Would employers see a Master’s as enough to enter the field, even without a Bachelor’s in Supply Chain?

This happened to me recently and it made me think about how quickly things can change in supply chain and business
u spend time checking prices, suppliers, demand, shipping times, whatever you need to make a decision
Everything looks fine. Then a few wks later, u find out something changed and half the information u were working with is no longer useful
a supplier changed something. Prices moved. Demand picked up. A route got delayed…..
Whatever it is, you’re suddenly making a decision based on information that was accurate not that long ago
I’m starting to think the hard part isn’t always finding information. It’s knowing how long you can actually trust it
for those working in supply chain or logistics, do you run into this too? How often do you guys go back and update the information you’re using, or do you mostly just deal with it when something changes?

The Investment: We are raising a [100000 USD Seed Round] to expand our fleet operations across the GCC.

Are you available for a brief 10-minute introductory call this week?

I ran into a procurement problem and I'm curious how other teams handle it

While working in procurement, I noticed how much time our team was spending on manual purchasing and operational tasks.

We had plenty of data, but turning that data into a good purchasing decision wasn't always straightforward.

Demand, inventory, lead times, open orders, seasonality, safety stock, MOQ, supplier constraints… all of these factors can affect three basic questions:

What should we order?
When should we order it?
How much should we order?

A lot of our time was spent manually bringing all this information together.

We were mainly using Min/Max inventory levels, but I found a problem with this approach: when demand changed, the Min/Max levels had to be changed as well.

So when demand suddenly increased, we would often only react after we had already started selling more. And the opposite was true when demand dropped, the existing levels could keep us ordering too much.

I started working in Excel myself to bring these factors together and show management what a smarter and more automated purchasing process could look like.

The idea of the tool was simple: load in the data, and let the model show where we had too much or too little inventory and provide straightforward purchase recommendations.

I often got responses like "but we already paid for the inventory and we will sell it anyway" or "this is how we've always done it."

Meanwhile, I kept thinking: how much of this inventory is actually necessary, and how much is simply tying up cash?

I inlcluded:

• EOQ
• Reorder Point
• Safety Stock & Service Levels
• Demand & Seasonality
• Supplier Lead Times
• Open Orders & Goods in Transit
• MOQ & Minimum Order Values

What I'm really interested in is how other procurement teams deal with this challenge? because building such a tool takes quite some time and experience? 

Do you still rely heavily on Excel for purchasing decisions, or do you use another tool alongside your ERP? Or no ERP at all? Or do you just leave it be?

I'd be genuinely interested to hear how others have approached this, whether you've built something yourself, implemented a system, or found another way to deal with changing demand, inventory levels and a lot of operational work in purchasing?

Stop calling legacy ERP systems "innovative."

The classical ERPs we rely on, like SAP and Microsoft, are single-handedly killing supply chain innovation.

While they promote digital agendas, these legacy "dinosaurs" are leaving teams trapped in manual processes.

Planners are still forced to download historical demand, batch orders, and safety stock data just to run basic math.

An ERP should deliver real-time decision intelligence out of the box—notifying you automatically when to reduce safety stock because you haven't sold inventory, or when to adjust batch orders.

Because ERPs are failing to innovate even in the age of AI, agile startups are stepping up. They can pull legacy data and solve complex planning mathematics in just four hours. Yet, legacy ERP giants are surprisingly slow to acquire these game-changers.

But even for these innovative point solutions, a massive bottleneck remains: The 4-to-6-Month Sales & Integration Cycle.

Why does implementing new supply chain technology take so long?

1️⃣ CFO Budget Approvals: Navigating license fees and budget approval loops.

2️⃣ IT & Cybersecurity Vetting: Clearing ISO compliance and user data ownership debates.

3️⃣ The ERP Integration Loop: Spending up to four months figuring out API, flat file, or cron job connections.

Until supply chain innovators find a way around legacy ERP integration and IT bottlenecks, the adoption of Agentic AI is going to be a nightmare.

What has been your biggest frustration when integrating new technology with your legacy ERP?

Let’s discuss in the comments!

Follow www.scmdojo.com and www.scmsensei.ai for updated on Supply Chan Knowledge and AI applications in supply chain

We are building MethodTimer application to analyze process videos for MTM (Method Time Measurement).

With MethodTimer, logistics teams can turn MTM analyses that traditionally take up to 3 days into just minutes.

Simply upload your process video and let MethodTimer identify operations, process steps, measure times, and generate actionable insights—helping your team focus on improving processes instead of spending days analyzing them.

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Something I’ve been thinking about lately
a supplier can work perfectly for years, so there’s not much reason to look elsewhere. Good quality, decent pricing, deliveries are usually on time… why change anything?
the problem is you might not realize how dependent you’ve become until something goes wrong
a price increase, production issue, shipping delay or even a sudden change in the supplier’s business can leave you scrambling for alternatives
and finding a backup supplier after the problem happens is usually way harder than doing it beforehand
for those working in supply chain or logistics, how do you guys handle this??

We're planning to replace our current software and are trying to find something that's built for waste hauling instead of adapting a generic TMS. The biggest priorities for us are dispatching, route management, customer accounts, billing, and reporting, all in one system.

What platforms have worked well for your business, and are there any you'd avoid?

I've been looking into CurbWaste because it seems to have most of the features we need, but I'd like to hear some real-world experiences before committing.

The high-tech, next-generation fulfillment center represents a $1.3 billion investment and will create 1,000 jobs, per the release. Construction is slated to start in late 2026.

Source: Supply Chain Dive

See all the news: www.[scroundup.com](http://scroundup.com)

Hi everyone could you all please guide me for job change in supply chain. I have 6 years of experience in order to cash and supply chain management. I have completed IIM executive program in supply chain. Currently I am holding 6 LPA package and in this crucial time want to increase my pay(80k to 100k). I have worked in MNCs including TCS. Thanks.

I’ve been thinking about how misleading supplier price comparisons can become when the quotation scope isn’t standardized.
For example, two suppliers may quote what appears to be the same industrial product, but the offers can differ in:
material/specification
included accessories
testing
packaging
certification
MOQ
warranty
lead time
Incoterm
So a quote that is 10–15% cheaper may not necessarily represent a 10–15% lower cost for the same requirement.
It may simply be a different scope.
This makes me think the first step in price comparison should actually be scope normalization, not sorting quotations from lowest to highest.
For people involved in sourcing or procurement:
What are the first things you check to make sure two supplier quotations are genuinely comparable?
And which hidden differences tend to cause the biggest surprises later?

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I've been thinking about how companies define a “backup supplier.”

Having another vendor's name in the system doesn't necessarily mean you can actually switch to them.

When was the last time they quoted the material?

Have you placed an order with them recently?

Do you know their actual lead time and available capacity?

If your primary supplier told you Monday morning they couldn't ship for 30 days, how long would it really take you to move?

And maybe the bigger question: who in your organization has the authority to make that decision?

I'm curious how others handle this.

Do you actively test critical backup suppliers with occasional orders, or is qualification enough until you actually need them?

Starts empty.
Ends up being the result of a ridiculous number of tiny decisions.