John Astad thinks a lot about iPads these days, but not for the same reasons most people do. He’s haunted by the deaths of three people who lost their lives during the production of these kinds of gadgets. He’s haunted by the fact that the explosion that killed these people didn’t have to happen. Astad knows a lot about workplace explosions—ones caused when dust ignites. As director and research analyst at the Combustible Dust Policy Institute in Santa Fe, Tex., Astad knows more about this occupational hazard than most people do.

And what he knows about this accident is not only that it didn’t have to happen, but that it will probably keep happening at other plants in other parts of the world, including right here in the U.S. The one involving the iPad line happened at a plant in China owned by Foxconn, a subsidiary of Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision. They also do work for Dell and H-P. The people on this particular production line were responsible for putting the shiny finish on these electronic toys—a process that produces ultra-light aluminum dust particles.

“The irony of it all, is the May 6 published research report by SACOM, Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour, which made note of industrial hygiene problems at such plants in a short paragraph about aluminum dust in the workplace,” Astad wrote in a recent blog post. “I know that if many here in the ComDust group were made aware of this report prior to the recent dust explosion, instead of after the fact, then we could have provided SACOM with a heads up on potential explosion hazards. Maybe some lives could have been saved. I don’t know and never will know.”

Foxconn has made news in the past for reasons other than its productivity. According to SACOM’s report, at least 13 employees died of apparent suicides last year. And MH&L’s editorial director, Dave Blanchard noted in a column last year that “the management practices at Foxconn are so abhorrent that 14 employees have committed or attempted suicide, all of them by jumping out of windows.”

Where combustible dust is concerned, U.S. manufacturers are not models of safety either. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), since 1980, nearly 150 workers have been killed and more than 850 injured in combustible dust explosions. To explore methods for preventing such explosions, OSHA invited outside experts to participate in a Combustible Dust Expert Forum in early May and will use their views to develop possible regulatory options for addressing combustible dust hazards.

John Astad told me he has a couple problems with this meeting. First, none of the “Experts” came from an industry where combustible dust is most common, i.e., metal, food or wood. Second, no one from a professional fire service was involved. The experts who were there included National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) ComDust Technical Committee members, insurance industry representatives, an academic, and two from organized labor. “So an organized labor official knows more about combustible dust fires at manufacturing facilities than the professional fire service?,” Astad asks.

One big problem I saw after looking at a meeting summary was that even among the experts on hand, not all of them were in accord about this particular occupational hazard. According to this summary, posted by Conversion Technology, Inc, some members of the panel suggested that dust with low explosive properties and hard-to-ignite dust should possibly be excluded, or at least should be addressed differently than more hazardous and easily ignitable dust. Other members of the panel warned that there is no technical support for this exclusion, and pointed out that a number of serious dust fire and explosion events have occurred due to what were thought to be “low-hazard” dusts.

I hope OSHA talks to John Astad—even though he is an outspoken critic of OSHA’s current combustible dust rulemaking process. His biggest problem with the agency’s procedures is that they tend to focus on dust explosions and neglect dust fires, which are the precursors to explosions.

“The [OSHA] data conflicts with the 2006 CSB Dust Hazard Study that notes fatalities and injuries from both combustible dust fires and explosions,” he blogged recently. “In stark contrast, the OSHA ComDust rulemaking process press releases state fatalities and injuries are solely from dust explosions.”

He followed up with another post asking colleagues “Does it matter if OSHA manipulates fatality and injury data for combustible dust incidents in the rulemaking process?”

I’ll pass that question on to you. And if you think combustible dust doesn’t concern you, I’ll add a few more questions. Do you have a workplace? Do you have dust—any kind of dust—in that workplace? Do you have sources of ignition in that workplace—like internal combustion engine lift trucks? If you can answer yes to all of those, you have your work cut out for you. If possible fires and explosions don’t bother you, just think of poor productivity. Where there’s dust there’s probably clutter too—and wasted space and time.

Public education is starting to adopt the airlines’ model of a la carte pricing. If your kids wants to take a lot of specialized courses and extracurricular activities to prepare themselves for lucrative careers, it’s going to cost you plenty in fees. So, say you shell out for all these programs, what’s your return on that investment? Maybe the kids eventually get the jobs of their dreams. What’s that worth to you?

Supply chain officers face a similar challenge when trying to raise talented individuals in their organizations. According to “The Chief Supply Chain Officer Report 2011,” based on a study conducted by Dr. Hau Lee, Chairman of SCM World, and Kevin O’Marah, an SCM World faculty member, a large majority of the 750 global executives who responded to their survey said they are willing to invest in training and other education to build and maintain talent. In fact, 16% of them said they spend over 5% of the fully loaded cost of personnel on training. The overall average spend on training is about 3% of personnel expenses.

That’s impressive. What’s surprising to me is how few of these supply chain officers measure the ROI from this investment. You know if they were to drop this much money into an automated storage system or guided vehicles, they’d want to know whether their investment is bearing financial fruit.

Apparently where training of their human resources is concerned, payback is taken on faith. The report’s authors indicate that the percentage of respondents who track performance improvement following training as an ROI measure (22%) is dwarfed by the portion that doesn’t measure ROI at all (60%). Granted, that’s probably not much different from what they—or you and I—do as parents when they pay tuition and activity fees for their kids. They probably just cross their fingers and hope for the best. But for people who pride themselves on measuring supply chain performance, you would think they’d want to gauge the effectiveness of the people they put in charge of something so tightly linked to a company’s value proposition.

This study reports that 80% of respondents rank supply chain improvements as an important or very important means for value creation through increasing revenue. Sixty-one percent view such improvements as very important for value creation through long term equity improvements (such as enhanced customer service and loyalty).

“Such results provide a strong signal that viewing supply chain improvement as a foundation for value creation is no longer limited to the more progressive and innovative supply chain companies and that there is now a widespread view (and we expect corresponding action) amongst supply chain executives to ‘go after’ value creation,” the report states.

Maybe these executives feel they’re going to eventually lose these people they’re training anyway, so why spend the money to gauge how much skill and knowledge they’ve absorbed?

“Senior executives find it difficult to locate these skills in the marketplace and harder still to hold a team together as knowledge builds over the course of a career,” this study concludes.

Here’s my guess as to why gauging talent ROI is overlooked: maybe the talent pool is seen as just that—a closed system in which if you lose a talented individual to a competitor you assume you’ll fill your vacancy the same way; by steeling it from another competitor. Maybe talent, like waves, ebbs and flows.

But here’s another guess: if these execs were to invest in the processes necessary to gauge the effectiveness of training—and then share that feedback with those they’re training—maybe those individuals would get the message that they’re valued team members and they’d want to stay on that team. In that case, I’d argue ROI assessment has a pretty good ROI.

There’s a burning issue (sorry) in the world of the beef production supply chain: whether cattle ranchers should continue to identify cattle using hot brands, or to instead opt for ear tags. The idea of ear tagging cattle is not a new one—my own grandfather, for instance, used them on his dairy farm decades ago—but large cattle ranches typically opt for the hot brands as a quick and highly visual way to differentiate between herds, especially out on the open ranges where cattle occasionally get mixed up with other herds.

However, according a recent Wall Street Journal article, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is now proposing that every cow needs to have an ear tag, in some cases including radio frequency identification, to help track the entire cattle lifecycle, “from farm to fork” as the saying goes. Where this becomes an issue is the fear among some beef producers that branding will no longer be an option.

In an open letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, industry trade group R-CALF writes:

“In one fell swoop, the Obama Administration is poised to clinch the prize that eluded the Bush Administration for four years – that prize is the denigration of the United States cattle industry’s iconic, centuries-old, hot-iron brand. It is apparent the prize’s sponsor, the World Trade Organization, has successfully persuaded the Obama Administration to denigrate America’s hot-iron brand to not only make room for the internationally numbered ear tag, but also to elevate that tag to an exclusive category. So exclusive is the category that it bumped out America’s centuries-old brand to get there.”

The letter, in no uncertain terms, suggests that Vilsack misled them (well, R-CALF says he “outright lied” to them) when he earlier promised that hot brands would remain on the list of official identification devices. As R-CALF sees it, eliminating the hot brand option represents a capitulation “to a global agenda under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, Codex Alimentarius, and the World Organization for Animal Health. Europe does not rely on brands so the United States must not either?”

A recent survey conducted by our sister Penton publication, Beef magazine, asked its readers what it thought about the USDA’s idea of dropping the hot brand as an official ID method. By a 2-to-1 margin, they thought it was a bad idea.

So the issue really isn’t whether ear-tagging is a better way to track cattle (though some say it definitely is better), but whether it makes sense to eliminate the branding option from consideration. And quite a few cattle ranchers have a major concern that the USDA is feeding them a load of, well, cow pies on the matter.

Last month at Microsoft ’s MIX conference, the company announced a tool kit is coming for developers to build motion-sensor applications to run on Windows and Kinect. Kinect motion sensors are used in Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video-game system. According to Microsoft, these sensors will eventually transcend the mouse, the keyboard and even the touch screen.

The sensors obviously did their job, because developers who attended the MIX conference were moved to think about business applications for them after seeing demos by Microsoft researchers. One Microsoft guy showed how he could fly through the universe using imagery captured by the worldwide telescope project. In another demo someone rolled out on stage in a recliner–steering by waving his hands in front of a Kinect sensor connected to a Windows PC on his lap.

An attendee who had already been researching uses for Nintendo Wii technology had one thing on his mind after seeing all this: Forklifts. According to the Seattle Times, Tohru Katori, president and founder of Tokyo-based developer Azest, is starting to think about how the technology could be applied to forklifts, robots and assembly lines.

“We think of using this technology for smart grid or smart inventory,” he said, such as directing a robot to move parts around a warehouse.

Roger Bostelman has similar ideas. He’s project manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology Intelligent Systems Division. I spoke with Roger by phone recently while researching an article on lift truck trends for MH&L’s upcoming June issue. He mentioned the Kinect sensors and that his research team is already starting to do measures on how these could be applied to lift trucks. He’s impressed by the quality of the 3D imaging, which can pick up the profile and motions of a person. He believes the costs of this technology will come down enough for it to be justifiable for industrial applications.

“The initial ones were $150 apiece, but I’ve been told they’ll go down to about $60 apiece,” he told me. “When you go down to those numbers, you could put five sensors on a vehicle and put a full surround 3D imaging system on it.”

Do we really need to turn lift trucks into rolling sensurround experiences for their operators? Bostelman thinks as the technology gets more mainstream and managers get “fed up with accidents,” a solid case could be made for it. In the near term lift truck OEMs will continue to improve alerts and give operators better visibility. In the longer term, he sees a time when, if an operator doesn’t react within a certain period of time to something, the vehicle will take over.

“The piece that’s missing is identifying which objects are human,” he says. “These lift trucks are made to bounce into things, so if the driver constantly gets alerted about there being just a box in the way, the driver could get inundated with such alerts because the sensor would say you’re too close to something. The real key is, which one of those objects is a person? To just sense anything in the environment would be ridiculous. It has to be intelligent enough to know what’s a person and what isn’t—unless they’re working around delicate equipment, then it should know about the other stuff too.”

All vehicles have blind spots—so, in effect, lift truck operators are blind in some instances. Up to now, design engineers have been doing their best to redesign masts and contour edges so visibility is maximized. Nevertheless, there are times when an operator is—for all intents and purposes—blind.

But once sensor-equipped lift trucks start taking over for operators to avoid unseen close encounters, maybe blindness will only be in the eye of the beholder.

In my last blog post from the Warehousing Education and Research Council (WERC) conference in Orlando, I may have left you with the impression that a theme seemed to be emerging—that successful material handling and logistics as practiced by warehousing professionals is based on people skills. As I conclude my WERC observations, I can’t help but continue this theme.

I attended several sessions on labor standards and training, and the clear message is that, even when adopting new technologies, the only way to achieve an ROI is by focusing on your human element. In his session on “Crowd Engineering in your DC,” Charles Epps, industrial engineer, director of customer service for the William Carter Co., providers of baby and young children’s clothing, explained how he worked with The Progress Group consultants to apply labor standards. It had been using training guides for zone picking that told employees how to do their job.

“We knew what to do but we never told them how to do it the right way, so performance varied,” Epps said. “For example, how do you walk and scan at the same time? The Progress Group was brought in to improve efficiency and productivity by developing labor standards to improve methods.”

Epps is an industrial engineer, and he admitted that one of the problems is that IEs in his organization tend to get promoted to other areas of the company so the company loses a lot of methodology with those moves. That makes it more important to ask associates what the engineers don’t see on the floor. The conclusion is that supervisors have issues too. They’re responsible for making sure work is always available for the associates. Holds, slow neighbors and out-of-work were the main performance barriers.

Crowd engineering at Carter changes the game from the laboratory to leveraging the collective intelligence of associates in the real world of work. They come up with their own best methods. Carter has developed coaching sheets to train supervisors so they can learn to explain variances. The result was over a 40% improvement in productivity. They celebrate successes and recognize those who are doing a good job. They also found they didn’t need a financial incentive program to make standards work.

In another session on labor management, Caroline Dreyer, vice president of fulfillment operations for the Home Shopping Network, explained how she worked with TZA Consulting to find the right way to apply people, processes and technology. In contrast to the Carter story, HSN does apply financial incentives to juice up human performance. This makes standards even more critical, and Dreyer said if you build standards around what people have already done you build inefficiencies into your approach. That’s why she relies on a best practice multidisciplinary team that includes HR, IT and engineering to make sure they’re defining fair standards.

“You can have 400% variability if you don’t define a fair standard,” Dreyer said. “Engineered standards give you building blocks. But make sure management validates the standards. This promotes buy-in.”

HSN uses those standards as the foundation of their pay-for-performance system. They took two years to roll this program out, but eventually realized a 20% increase in productivity and asset utilization. They also drove cost per unit down 13% resulting in a savings of $4.9 million.

Lessons: don’t start in your most tenured, experienced facility. Start with the smallest. Dreyer admitted their original timeline was too short, and they learned the importance of taking more time to help employees understand the standards. Their biggest results came from processing more throughput using the same headcount. 75% of their employees are earning gainsharing money—an additional $25 per week on average.

But, just as was learned in the Carter experience, supervisors need to provide the right environment to make standards work. That means releasing work to the floor on time and ensuring a clean, uncluttered workplace.

Clutter is a mental thing too, and it was luncheon speaker Randy Lewis, senior V.P. of distribution and logistics for Walgreens who stole the WERC show with his moving presentation demonstrating how it’s possible for “typically abled” executives and associates to clear the clutter of prejudice from their minds to bring a new standard of excellence to the logistics workplace. Lewis said that before his organization committed itself to employing “differently abled” people in Walgreen’s Anderson, SC distribution center, he was concerned about their ability to find enough good candidates for employment.

That concern is gone. Today, 40% of the employees at the Anderson site have disabilities. That’s 198 people. Another facility in Connecticut has 222 with disabilities—half the workforce. Lewis says it ups everyone’s game. The differently abled rise to the challenge of working in a DC environment and their typically abled associates learn the joy of helping make someone else successful. The payoff is employees who find things to do during lulls in the action—without waiting for a push to get busy.

“It changed the way we manage,” Lewis said. “We’re better people as well as better managers.”

In a follow-up session, Chris Johnson, division VP at Walgreen’s, said his biggest fear was how the typically abled would accept this. Just as in the Carter and HSN cases, communication is key. Walgreen’s focused on getting employee input in preparation for this model.

“They came up with solutions on how to make it work,” Johnson said.

And it works in more ways than one. What I learned from this year’s WERC conference through session after session was that just as labor standards help make the work environment safer and more productive, so do high standards of human behavior. But don’t take it from me, take it from Randy Lewis, who lives this philosophy every day at Walgreen’s. His typically-abled employees have raised their own performance bar and their differently-abled colleagues are more than happy to join them in their leap of faith to get over preconceived doubts about the power of their own human spirit.

I’m in Orlando, FL this week for WERC’s annual conference. I almost blew off Monday’s early breakfast keynote because I got in late the night before and thought the speaker’s topic was too touchy feely to have much value: “Relationships for Group Success.” But being your diligent servant, I dragged myself to breakfast and forced myself to take the speaker seriously. Turned out, I didn’t have to use much force.

I couldn’t argue with Author and expert on professional relationship development Keith Ferrazzi ‘s contention that the nature of work has changed. Technology has enabled people in different geographies to link up for virtual meetings as often as we want. Ironically workers are more isolated than ever. Many managers aren’t even co-located any more. Ferrazzi suggested that this social isolation has resulted in workers who don’t have people who “have their backs.” He cited a study that claims as many as 50% of Americans say no one has their back—and 60% of them are married!

This is traumatic for humans who are tribal by nature. We instinctively need to belong to something—churches, community groups, clubs—but these opportunities are going away as people isolate themselves to virtual communities. Ferrazzi congratulated WERC for keeping its annual conference going and giving attendees an opportunity to help each other. In fact he concluded with a suggestion for his audience: try to find a way to be helpful, not just to network. “Relationship skills are the predictor of success. Use ‘How can I help you?’ as a conversation starter.’”

I didn’t have the guts to be that weird in my conference encounters, but believe it or not, the perfect opportunity to be helpful happened during the very next session I attended. “Journey to Safety Excellence” was the title, and Ronda Ruane was one of the speakers. She’s a regional general manager for Lowe’s Companies, and her priority for this home and hardware retailer’s DCs is to establish a culture of safety—which she says has to start with the line manager. “If you walk by a situation you don’t take time to correct, you ‘ve just lowered your safety standards,” she said. And that’s what happens when business goals compete with a safety culture.

But at Lowe’s their safety culture is the foundation for operational excellence. Team leaders meet with their team members until they have the confidence to address safety issues every day. They are encouraged to come up with new solutions and act on them. And they are rotated to different areas of the operation to spread the wealth. Her organization adopted the DuPont “STOP” (Safety Training Observation Program) program which helps heighten safety awareness and consistency across shifts, coaches and buildings. Team leaders use score cards to record data, find safety “hot spots” like not bending correctly, messy work stations, etc. It took Lowe’s six months to implement this program and they’re enjoying a low annual recordable injury rate (.58 vs. the national average of 10).

The question and answer session was my opportunity to be helpful. I asked Ronda if she ever thought of contacting OSHA to take part in its VPP (Voluntary Protection Program). That’s where you volunteer to be inspected by OSHA and if they find any safety problems they help you solve them rather than cite you. She never even heard of that program. Normally that admission would have made me question the credibility of someone so committed to occupational safety. But on reflection, the fact she was implementing a safety program without OSHA’s instigation raised her credibility in my eyes—and obviously in the eyes of her people. She thanked me and wrote herself a note to look into the VPP.

I hope this was a good deed–that goes unpunished.

If you like to watch CSI, that CBS series about crime scene investigators, it may be because, as a supply chain professional, you relate to their problem solving techniques. Many of the show’s fans do, and their enthusiasm has resulted in a hit series and a couple spinoffs (CSI Miami and CSI New York).

But while most of the shows’ fans can only dream of being part of such investigations, many supply chain professionals in the show’s vast audience have to sift through clues of their own every day. Indeed, an industry has been built from the need to track and trace items through the food and pharma supply chains, for example.

Now, we at MH&L get a lot of press releases announcing automatic data collection and labeling solutions. Most of these announcements don’t involve the kind of stuff that inspires network melodramas, but every once in a while I’ll get a new product announcement that puts me in a Walter-Mitty-like dream.

Last week I got one from Applied DNA Sciences Inc. (APDN), which announced it was working with the U.S. Government to prevent the use of counterfeit microchips in mission critical hardware. Such counterfeiting “can lead to potential life-threatening equipment failures,” the announcement stated.

Here’s where my inner Walter Mitty was awakened. The release told how Robert P. Ernst, the head of the Naval Air Systems Command anti-counterfeiting team, investigated the case of a counterfeit microchip found in a night-attack Marine Corps fighter jet. The chip didn’t contain lead in its solder joints, which could cause the jet’s controls to fail.

After Ernst called the chip’s suppliers, it became apparent the military had been duped into purchasing fake chips. On the other end of the phone he heard children playing in the background. Turned out this was a small business operated out of someone’s home and these people were just two of many such home businesses that get tricked into buying from inscrutable sources. Needless to say, these mom and pops don’t do product screening. Apparently, 15% of the chips sold to the military are fakes.

Ernst found out about APDN and is now working with them on a solution. It saw an opportunity to have the microchip vendors tag their chips with unique strands of DNA that can’t be replicated. If such DNA is applied during the manufacturing process, by a reputable supplier, it validates the product’s authenticity.

I called Janice Meraglia, a spokesperson for APDN, to see if this kind of forensic process was applicable in other industries represented by MH&L readers.

“It’s transferrable to a host of other areas away from electronics,” she told me. “It can transfer to the food and pharmaceutical chains. In pharma we can be part of the packaging process which is where most anti-tamper solutions go, but because our DNA is a green product [taken from daisy DNA], it can be on the dose itself. We are not doing that yet, but the amount of DNA we use to mark a product is so infinitesimally small it’s in parts per billion. All we need is one molecule.”

So in a supply chain scenario, if this DNA is part of a process, it can be used to verify a product went through all the appropriate points in a chain. The product can be tested at different points.

“Let’s say there’s a company with one general distribution channel but five different manufacturing plants, and somehow something is going awry and they can’t figure out how,” Meraglia explained. “If you’re putting on a mark in two locations and only one of those marks is on the product you know where your weak link is.”

This process has already been used to put currency counterfeiters in the klink. It’s happening in the U.K., where cash is transported by unarmed guards. This DNA is put into a degradation dye, and that dye is part of an exploding pack that goes into a case with the money. If this case is broken into or taken off course the dye explodes and the DNA marks everything it comes into contact with—the money, the person who took it, the car he was in when he took it, the shoes on his feet, etc. Each cash box has a unique DNA code. When a criminal is picked up in relation to a crime, they put the UV light on them and see the DNA marker. They then swab the evidence and the DNA marker is authenticated in a lab. That ties the crook to a specific crime. If they have markings from more than one robbery, that ties them to organized crime. If two people are brought in with the same marker, the cops know they worked together on that crime.

Meraglia says they helped mete out 22 convictions and 120 years of jail time that way. Her company even received an excellence in policing award.

I may have to book a trip to Hollywood and make my pitch to CBS for “SCI—Supply Chain Investigation.”

Telecommunications and web technologies have done many growth-hungry companies a disservice. They’ve made globalization look too easy. This has been especially troubling for both transportation and logistics (T&L) service providers and the consumers of these services as they try to expand their presence from country to country. They’re learning painful lessons from culture shock.

It may be easy to pick up a phone or log onto a website to make technological connections with another company half-way around the world, but establishing a personal connection with that company’s people as the basis for a long-term business relationship still requires good old fashioned respect for cultural differences. We may all be using the same gadgets, but people from country to country have different social circuitry. Failure to understand those differences has threatened the success of many big corporate mergers and acquisitions in the T&L sector.

According to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers on first-quarter 2011 transportation and logistics industry mergers and acquisitions, 70% of deals fail to deliver their intended benefits, often because cultural and people issues are mismanaged. They failed to factor the human side of the transaction. That’s an expensive mistake, considering the money that’s at stake in these deals. These deals were valued at $84 billion in 2010, and that number is expected to be even bigger this year. The value of many of these deals can be threatened by simple, personal miscalculations.

The PwC report notes that the transportation and logistics industry has expanded in the major markets and is now eyeing the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—as well as the booming emerging markets of Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey, and Argentina.

“Finding, keeping, and motivating employees who have the right skill sets has become a top corporate priority to sustain this growth,” the report says. “Forty-three percent of the 60 T&L CEOs in 31 countries responding to the PwC 14th Annual Global CEO Survey reported plans for revising their people policies to boost employee engagement and retention. ‘Nonfinancial’ incentives figured heavily into their strategies.”

The PwC researchers recommend that an acquiring company define each employee’s importance to the business relative to the transition and beyond. The company should make an assessment regarding which employees it needs for short-term transition and long-term value creation. When defining these needs, companies examine three levels of criticality:

• Strategically critical—Employees most essential to the ongoing operations of the newly combined organization—typically, top executives, key business unit leaders, and key individual contributors.

• Integration critical—Employees essential to the integration effort.

• Knowledge-transfer critical—Employees with specialized knowledge essential to the transfer of ongoing information and know-how.

Companies that do business with these T&L giants have as much to learn about infrastructure differences between geographies as the T&L companies do about cultural differences. I recently spoke with Fabrizio Brasca, VP of Global Logistics for JDA Software, and he told me that what we assume to be best practices in North America really don’t apply elsewhere. For example, consolidation of freight from LTL to truckload may be somewhat applicable in India, but there are a lot more challenges involved because India doesn’t have the same infrastructure. Roads aren’t as abundant, the carrier community is fragmented, and there are tax implications across all regions.

“To go in with the mindset that you’ll play and replay what you’ve done in North America’s geography doesn’t make sense,” he said. “There’s value to be derived from combining geographies, not just from a physical standpoint but from an organizational and policy perspective.”

China’s another good example. Brasca says while there’s value in looking at consolidation opportunities in China as we do in North America, because of the disparate nature of the carrier community there, you’d be wise to consider visibility tools, both for the distribution network and into the facility operations themselves to ensure how they’ll stock their facilities from a picking and staging perspective.

So the point of all this is that while technology has given both freight carriers and shippers the gift of global mobility and visibility, we still have a lot to learn about what—and whom—we’re seeing.

When I say “workplace safety,” what comes to mind? Maybe it’s a lift truck operator wearing a seat belt. It could be a safety gate separating someone on a mezzanine from a steep fall. On the other hand, if your workplace has suffered from a rash of lost-time injuries, the image of an OSHA inspector, scribbling in his citation book, might still be imprinted on your brain. He may have been writing you up for operators not wearing restraints or for employees being denied the benefits of fall protection.

This isn’t just a mind game. If you can think of a particularly strong image you might win a prize—courtesy of OSHA. The Agency recently announced a nationwide photography contest called “Picture It! Safe Workplaces for Everyone.” They want anyone with a passion for photography to “capture an image of workplace safety and health and share it with the agency.”

Your prize? The glory of having your work displayed on the OSHA photo contest Web page. The first-place winner also will receive a framed letter of congratulations from Secretary Solis, and the first, second and third place winners will be framed and hung in OSHA’s national office in Washington, “where they will serve as a daily reminder for leading policymakers and prominent professionals of the real-life impact of OSHA’s mission.”

If you’re like most facility managers, your reward for safety is to avoid being reminded of OSHA. In fact, winning a photo contest is probably lower on your list of things that keep you focused on environmental health and safety (EH&S) than factors such as ensuring compliance, concern over the risk of an adverse event, corporate mandates, or high costs of avoidance. Those are the top pressures driving professionals to focus on EH&S, according to a recent Aberdeen Group study of “Compliance Management in Environment, Health and Safety.”

Interestingly, the report’s authors tell readers that even with compliance as a top market pressure, they shouldn’t “over-focus” on it, and that what they really need is executive leadership and vision to achieve the best outcomes. That said, they acknowledge that events like the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill might have inspired many of the 175 executives Aberdeen interviewed to worry that this meant a more aggressive regulatory environment for everyone. And what do they associate with that environment? Cost, revenue loss and complexity.

Whatever the motivation, the real rewards for safety vigilance by the best-in-class companies represented in the Aberdeen study included: a 12% drop in safety citations compared to the previous year, a 0.3 recordable injury frequency rate, a 1% repeat accident rate and a 13% gain in operating margin vs. their corporate plan.

The report’s authors link the following practices to best-in-class safety performance: automated collection of EH&S data shared with decision makers as actionable intelligence; standardized policies across all company locations; and investment in compliance management analytics.

If your company is more of a laggard than a leader where safety is concerned, maybe an OSHA photo contest is a good way to get your CEO’s attention. Whether you’re a professional or amateur photographer, your entry in OSHA’s competition is welcome. Your interpretation of an “image of workplace safety and health” is up to you. Just keep in mind, the judges will be looking for “the most outstanding portrayals of occupational safety and health in terms of artistic value, and ability to raise awareness about safety and health to the general public.”

The full contest rules are available at http://www.osha.gov/osha40/photo-contest.html.

If you enter a shot of an OSHA inspector writing you a citation, I want partial credit on your entry.

This is a great time to be a player in the material handling industry. Even manufacturers of the most mature products—lift trucks—are having a good year. For example, Toyota Industries Corporation (TICO), dusting itself off after the supply chain challenges it faced after the recent earthquake and tsunami, reported a 7% rise in total consolidated net sales.

On the U.S. domestic front, Cleveland-based Nacco Industries—which also owns coal mines and kitchen appliance companies—earned $63 million during the first three months of this year. According to Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, the company’s earnings more than doubled because of booming sales of lift trucks and other material handling products. The PD reported that Nacco’s materials handling group sales (Yale and Hyster) were up 56 percent to $587 million, and earnings nearly tripled to $22 million.

This rise in sales appears to be a global phenomenon. In Tico’s fiscal 2011 financial summary, the company announced it intends to “accelerate our business expansion into rapidly growing emerging countries by thoroughly and meticulously monitoring market conditions in respective regions and introducing products suited to the characteristics and needs of each market.”

China represents one of the biggest opportunities among those emerging markets. There’s only one problem: it tends to absorb then adopt the innovations it buys. Although China’s President Hu Jintao promised President Obama that he would cancel rules that required foreign companies to do their design work in China if they wanted to sell to China, foreign manufacturers are still running into that trade restriction, as well as others.

That’s the problem for innovators wishing to take advantage of China’s growing consumer classes. Rather than enjoying the benefits of being the proverbial early bird in this market, some entrepreneurs are suffering the consequences of being the first mouse that went after the cheese in the trap. The lesson in this proverb is that it’s the second mouse that gets that cheese.

I learned that “second mouse” proverb from George F. Brown, Jr., co-founder of the Chicago consulting firm of Blue Canyon Partners, Inc. Brown believes that the success of the Chinese as fast learners should be a lesson for western firms hoping to hang onto their global market leadership. In a recent article he wrote with his China Practice Director, David Hartman, Brown offered strategies western firms should adopt if they want to thrive in emerging markets like China. One of them is “Rethink the emphasis of spending on research and product development.”

I wondered what Brown meant by that, so we exchanged e-mails. More specifically, I asked him if the amazing productivity enhancements of material handling equipment and systems means anything in a country where labor has always been cheap and plentiful. Can the manufacturers of this equipment still hope to command a premium for such productivity innovation in China?

“Chinese firms only rarely introduce automation in order to save on labor,” he answered. “But there is another phenomenon afoot that is quite important, and that it the Chinese emphasis on speed. The Chinese will welcome and adapt technology in areas like material handling if it enables them to get the job done faster—as opposed to with less labor. Firms trying to sell to Chinese customers, for example, that are used to arguing the merits of their products on the basis of ‘labor-saving productivity contributions’ in western markets need to change their emphasis to ‘reductions in the time to complete a job’ in China’s markets.”

So while speed to get the cheese killed the first mouse, opening an opportunity for the more leisurely second mouse to get the cheese out of the trap, I guess the Chinese see the need for speed in getting more mouse traps through their supply chain to replace all those sprung traps.

Here’s my proverb for the material handling industry: by all means, sell into China your fast and efficient conveyors and lift trucks to support their rapid supply chain flow of mouse traps—just avoid any cheese and demand the beef.