Government employers might be able to learn a thing or two about safety practices from private sector employers. According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Illness and injury rates for public sector workers overall are at 5.7 cases for every 100 workers, which is more than 60 percent higher than the private sector rate.

This dismal record might be even worse, considering the poor record keeping OSHA cited in its recent press release:

“We are concerned with poor record-keeping practices and programs that discourage workers from reporting injuries and illnesses,” it stated. “That’s why OSHA is working hard to ensure the completeness and accuracy of these data, which are compiled by the nation’s employers.”

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is one of the biggest offenders where reporting is concerned. Earlier this year OSHA announced that it received more than 170 worker complaints alleging ergonomic hazards at USPS Processing and Distribution Centers (P&DCs) nationwide. While investigating those ergonomic hazards, OSHA found numerous problems with USPS practices regarding OSHA’s injury and illness recordkeeping requirements. Eight of the ten inspections resulted in the issuance of citations for recordkeeping violations.

“OSHA believes that under-recording of injuries and illnesses may be a pervasive problem at the USPS,” wrote David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for Occupational Safety and Health. “The percentage of the inspected facilities with violations is indicative of a systemic failure by the USPS in properly maintaining the OSHA Log of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses.”

That’s scary stuff, considering the other kinds of violations OSHA is finding at USPS sites. For example, OSHA cited a U.S. Postal Service site in West Palm Beach, Fla., for eight alleged safety violations following a November 2010 inspection. Proposed penalties totaled $164,200. Six repeat violations included failing to appropriately mark aisles on the loading dock where forklifts were operating; exposing employees to being struck by the forklifts; allowing employees on the loading dock to operate a dumper at the edge of the dock without fall protection; exposing them to a fall of 50 inches; blocking aisles with mail cages; preventing employees from quickly evacuating in case of a fire; exposing workers to fall and electrical hazards by requiring them to climb a ladder and reach over with a wooden pole in order to use disconnect switches for battery chargers; incorrectly labeling containers used to store waste oil and solvents in the battery and oil waste room; and failing to perform monthly inspections with certification records of the hoist chain on the overhead crane that moved batteries weighing up to 3,000 pounds.

Two serious violations with proposed penalties of $9,000 included requiring forklifts to turn and travel in areas on the loading dock that were not kept clear of mail carts, thus exposing workers to being struck by the forklifts, and obstructing the exit route near the loading dock with boxes and equipment, decreasing the capacity of the exit route in case of evacuation. Serious means there is substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result from a hazard about which the employer knew or should have known.

Cindy Coe, OSHA’s regional administrator in Atlanta, issued the following public tongue-lashing:

“Blocking aisles and placing workers in hazardous situations where they may be struck by a forklift are dangers that should have been identified and corrected by management without waiting for an OSHA inspection. The Postal Service has been cited by OSHA at other locations for these same violations, and we will not tolerate this type of disregard for employees’ safety and health.”

These are problems that have come to the surface. Who knows how many safety violations are festering deep within the system. To be fair, the same can be said of the private sector. However, any service funded by taxpayer dollars gives all U.S. citizens an interest in the effort to see that USPS cleans up its safety record. Maybe cutting Saturday mail service would be a good start.

The power of enterprise computing fits in the palm of your hand these days, and consumers are sharing in that power thanks to smart phones. Many of those consumers also have supply chain jobs and are responsible for supplying fellow consumers. That brings to mind a strange phenomenon that may be starting as sales of iPhone and iPad devices grow.

I read recently that e-tail giants such as Apple and Amazon will enjoy the lion’s share of sales of these devices because consumers like ordering them online, directly from the source. That’s a direct threat to brick and mortar outlets like Best Buy and Walmart. Yet I’ll wager that most of the people who work in the back rooms and distribution centers of those stores not only ordered smart phones online, but are starting to use them for their jobs.

John Freund, CEO of Jump Technologies, told me people started out buying these devices for their own personal use but now they’re looking for more and more apps for these devices, including ones that can help them on the job. Freund’s company sprang up to help fill that niche, and he sees it as a benefit not only for these end users on-the-job, but for their employers as well.

In its strategy brief, Jump Technologies states that deploying a mobile app for field sales ordering is straightforward since “nearly all sales people today carry a smartphone.” A mobile app opens access to complete customer histories when these salespeople are at a customer site. The built-in camera turns the smartphone into a barcode reader to scan products to order them and/or record inventory levels.

“Sales staff can take the scans and then automatically calculate the order from the par levels set up by the customer or assemble the scanned items into an order,” the brief continues. “The orders then can be viewed or submitted directly to a billing system or sent via a fax or an email.”

Freund said that as his company researched the mobile device trend they also recognized an opportunity to put proof of delivery on a smart phone. The technology’s ubiquity is making e-commerce fulfillment easier to justify, he added.

“Research shows you’re more likely to go back to the house to get your phone than you are your purse or wallet,” he told me. “Since everybody carries these devices on them, why not leverage them as your proof of delivery solution? We ported our POD solution to iPhone and Android. The other nice piece of the platform is it’s a smart phone with millions of applications out there like GPS tracking, which was a paid-for feature in our previous application, but is now free because we’re just using another existing app at the app store that does GPS tracking.”

One of Jump’s customers, Office City, in Redwood City, Calif., is a mid-tier office supply dealer who is using smart phones to place orders through the e-commerce site and is using Android tablet devices to get proof of delivery of those orders.

“The beauty that Steve Jobs set the bar on was to make these user interfaces very simple,” Freund summarized.

But I wonder if Jobs realized the supply chain conundrum these devices would cause. On one hand they make e-commerce easy to participate in for a consumer and an easy business platform for any small business to adopt. On the other hand, it’s making these transactions so simple that the brick and mortar retail outlets hoping to have a merry Christmas-selling-season may actually lose sales of these devices to the e-tailers who also happen to be adopting them.

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, consumer expectations for technology spending are up more than 10 points from this time last year. The CEA also expects online sales to surge. And as long as Amazon offers unlimited shipping for a set fee, the mall and strip retailers will have a hard time competing against that as well.

Maybe they can offer their material handling and logistics employees discounts if they buy their iPhones and iPads off the shelf. On second thought, that might be like giving your housekeeper a broom for Christmas—and asking her to tidy up the house before guests arrive for Christmas dinner.

As hard as it is to attract good talent to work in a store or distribution center these days, if I were Best Buy or Walmart, I’d put cash in my people’s pockets this Christmas. Chances are there’s an iPhone there already.

Innovators see things differently. What appears to be an empty engine plant to you and me looked like a “Factory of Terror” to John Eslich when he bought a dead Canton, Ohio engine plant a few years ago. During a sour economy, innovators like him turn into lemonade squeezers–and they command a premium price for it. And now that Halloween is around the corner, Eslich squeezes money out of the ghosts of past productivity. Today people that enter this plant’s doors gladly pay $23 to get scared by made-up bogey men, unlike the plant’s previous owners whose money was squeezed out of them by being on the losing side of the mysterious forces of supply and demand.

I read about this latest spin on haunted Halloween attractions in a Plain Dealer article last week and it got me to thinking how many diverse forms innovation can take. Another article reported on a horse that fell into a 20-foot water-filled well. To most people that would signify a dead horse. To one SPCA investigator with an appreciation for the horsepower of a lift truck, it meant a life-saving solution. After managing to place a harness around the 1,100-pound animal, a lift truck was used to extricate it.

These are examples of people connecting seemingly non-connectable dots. In a new book, “The Innovator’s DNA,” association is identified as one of the key discovery skills shared by all innovators. As the Wall Street Journal reported recently, while association is a cognitive skill, innovators also share behavioral skills like questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. Those also happen to be skills that are part of every material handling and logistics professional’s job description.

MH&L will be celebrating such innovation in its December issue when we announce the winners of our first Innovation Awards program. Our Editorial Advisory Board is looking back at some of the best examples of material handling and logistics innovation we’ve covered in the past year and they will help us select the best of the best at making, storing, moving and competing. The people being considered were faced with daunting material handling and logistics challenges and made the connections needed between disparate factors to craft solid solutions.

Keep your eyes peeled for that issue, but in the meantime, if you’ve been through that process of solution creation yourself, share your story with us. You could be among MH&L’s next class of innovators. Just shoot me an e-mail at tom.andel@penton.com describing the opportunity you ran toward while everyone else was looking for an escape hatch.

Do you trust your boss? If so, you’re in the distinct minority, according to a recent workforce study conducted by Kenexa titled Trust Matters. According to the study, 28% of all employees polled say they actively distrust their boss, and another 24% aren’t sure if they trust their boss or not. Only 48% say they trust their boss.

Some of these studies, to be fair, poll such a small sample that the results are highly inconclusive, but Kenexa based its findings on a survey of more than 10,000 U.S. employees, plus another 1,000 globally.

According to Jack Wiley, founder and executive director of the Kenexa High Performance Institute, “These significant levels of distrust demand attention from HR professionals, as they have clear implications for employee retention and well-being, as well as organizational performance.”

I’d go a big step further than just alerting the HR department that there’s a problem. I’d find out who these untrustworthy bosses are, why their employees find their behavior so undependable, and right the ship before an epidemic of bad bosses sinks the company.

Kenexa’s study indicates that employees who distrust their leaders are seven times more likely to report they are mentally and physically unwell, and almost half of employees who distrust their leaders are seriously considering leaving their employer. And who could blame them? Bad economy or not, if you’re working for a boss that simply cannot be trusted to conduct himself or herself in an honest and forthright matter, why would you stick around? If raises and promotions are always promised but never delivered, if downsizing is a constant occurrence at your company, if the boss is perceived to be somewhat shady or even blatantly incompetent – in short, if you feel like you’re stuck in a “Dilbert” comic strip, then the law of diminishing returns seems to suggest that the sooner you move on, then the sooner your mental and physical health will start improving.

Robert Hurley, a Fordham University professor as well as a consultant, addresses this problem in his new book, The Decision to Trust. Although Hurley is writing more for managers than employees, he also points out how devious scoundrels (e.g., Bernie Madoff) can manipulate situations so that they can appear to be trustful when in reality they’re the exact opposite. So it’s important to understand exactly how easy it is for a thoroughly untrustworthy person to talk out of both sides of their mouths, slapping you on the back with one hand while they pick your pocket with the other.

Assuming that only highly ethical and reliable managers ever come to the MH&L website, following are five best practices Hurley recommends for bosses who not only want their employees to trust them, but are willing to go the extra mile to actually earn their trust:

1. Align your interests with those whose trust you want. You have to earn your employees’ trust, and the best way to do that is to prove it by promoting their interests in a fair manner.

2. Demonstrate benevolent concern. If your employees sense that you’re only in it for yourself, and that furthering your own career takes precedence over everything else, then nobody is going to trust you.

3. Develop and demonstrate capability in the matter at hand. If you can’t make good on your commitments, it’s better not to make them at all because your employees will stop believing you’ll ever come through for them.

4. Create a track record of predictability and integrity. What motivates you to do the right thing? Do your employees respect you? Do you live by an unwavering code of honor?

5. Communicate, communicate, communicate… and do it clearly and openly.

The expression “that’s a stretch” usually gets applied to statements or conclusions that are built on faulty premises. So how do you best describe a weakly supported conclusion about the very act of stretching? A stretch about stretching?

There are plenty of special interest groups that will trot out some study or another that will tell you there are many benefits to indulging in something that’s not really good for you, whether it be liquor, coffee, chocolate or some other vice. But it’s rare when somebody will cite a study that says something good for you is actually not so good for you. There’s always a reason, though, once you connect all the dots.

Case in point: Humantech, a consulting firm specializing in ergonomics, has done a study that suggests that the cost of a stretching program for a medium-sized plant could cost a company roughly $400 thousand to $1.4 million dollar per year. “Wow,” you might think, “that’s a lot of money. I never realized that companies had to invest in that much equipment to support a stretching program.”

Actually, those costs don’t involve any capital outlays at all; the costs reflect the amount of lost work time – between 18 to 63 minutes per employee per week (or between 3-12 minutes per day), assuming 1,000 employees spread over three shifts.

So what we’re actually talking about is a period of time so small as to be virtually insignificant. If you took the time to analyze how you spent every minute of your workday, you’d probably find there are many moments that no actual activity takes place. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, recently studied exactly how much time Mariano Rivera, one of the greatest relief pitchers in the history of baseball, spent actually throwing the ball toward home plate. In 17 seasons with the Yankees, during which time he established the current record for most career saves, he has spent only eight hours and 50 minutes pitching, an amount that represents 0.1% of the elapses game time of his career.

The point being: You can run the “productivity” numbers any which way you’d like and find that significant amounts of time are being “wasted” (Rivera, according to the WSJ estimates, has spent 97% of his career not pitching), but you’d be fooling yourself if you think time spent in one activity would automatically be time gained in another if you eliminated the first activity.

As far as the stretching study goes, there’s an obvious but unasked question: What would happen if the employees didn’t stretch? If the program helps just one employee get through the day without developing a leg cramp or other condition that might lead to a missed day of work, then the program has already paid for itself.

Now, I could cynically mention Humantech’s conclusion that companies who are using stretching programs would be better off “using engineering controls, practices and methods” to reduce the likelihood of work-related injuries, and then point out that those controls, practices and methods just so happen to be services that Humantech provides. But I’ve been sitting here hunched over my keyboard for several hours today, so I think I’ll stretch my legs a bit.

Postscript: Jamie Mallon, vice president of Humantech, sent along the following comment in response to my blog post:

Thanks for engaging in this discussion Mr. Blanchard. We appreciate the opportunity to shed more light on the topic of stretching in the workplace as it is a common question in our industry, from clients and at conferences.

Our interest in talking about stretching in the workplace is to ensure people understand the impact of stretching programs on WMSD reduction vs. the impact of sound engineering improvements. First, we did not author any of studies that we drew conclusions from – what we did was tally the dollar value of the time spent on on stretching. The facts are clear, stretching is not a good strategy for reducing injury in the workplace and may, actually, create more problems by exacerbating pre-existing conditions or causing injury when done incorrectly – which, is the norm in many stretching programs.

We agree, that these are not a savings of capital outlays, rather savings of time. You argue that it is insignificant time – and we would agree that 3 to 12 minutes in the office is an insignificant amount of time. You probably spend an equal amount of time going to the washroom or re-filling your coffee. However, 3 to 12 minutes on a production floor is not insignificant and it is time which is accounted for and taken our of the production schedule. I would dare say, that it’s an amount of time that an operations/production manager would fight for.

For instance, at the low end, just 3 minutes shift means:

• an automotive plant will produce 3 fewer cars

• a distribution center will process at least 5 fewer orders per picker

• a tire plant will build 2 less tires per tire builder

• a cleaning staff will clean 1 less room per team

• a pharmaceutical line will package 8 fewer boxes of pills

Seems like “real” money to us.

You also state: “I could cynically mention Humantech’s conclusion that companies who are using stretching programs would be better off using engineering controls, practices and methods” to reduce the likelihood of work-related injuries, and then point out that those controls, practices and methods just so happen to be services that Humantech provides.”

Permit me a rebuttal…

Humantech is made up of consultants who are all Certified Professional Ergonomists from the BCPE and therefore bound by ethical and professional standards. Thankfully, we all come from varied backgrounds with education in Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Safety Management, Biomedical Engineering, Human Kinetics, Biomechanics and Kinesiology. So in short, we have the educational background, professional experience and certification to practice in the field of ergonomics and aim to impact system performance through the effective integration of people, work and technology.

We also have the knowledge and ability to develop, market, sell and implement stretching programs for our clients – so why don’t we? The answer is simple - the research tells us that they do not work.

The real point of our article was to identify that there is a cost to everything even a “free” stretching program – so why, in today’s economy and today’s lean times would you ever invest effort in anything that does not yield real results?

A conversation just got started on MH&L’s LinkedIn discussion group and I couldn’t resist pirating the topic for my blog. You might find it ironic that the topic I’m pirating is about trust, and how little of it is associated with American companies any more. I justify my piracy with the knowledge that you trust this blog to be interesting and relevant, so here goes.

According to the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer, which came out earlier this year, only 8 percent of people believe what companies say about themselves. The person who started this discussion on our LinkedIn discussion group wanted to know how fellow group members—particularly marketing folks—are helping their companies re-build that trust which is so vital in today’s highly-competitive business environment.

I dug a little deeper into the findings of the Edelman barometer and learned that the most important corporate reputation factors are quality products, trust, transparency, and employee welfare. That resonated with me because I just interviewed a guy from a company that relies heavily on feedback from customers to maintain the quality of its products—and therefore the trust of those customers.

The company is Hubert Products, a major supplier to the foodservice industry. It offers 30,000 products in its catalog, including everything from displays and food prep equipment to employee uniforms and tableware. Many of these products are breakable, so Tim Lansing, vice president of operations, relies on feedback from customers to help his company raise their quality bar.

When you manage 30,000 different SKUs, nothing is easy—least of all finding out why some of them break during the journey to the customer. To do that Lansing sits down with a group of key players in all of Hubert’s operational areas and asks how they can best act on the information from those customers when they call in with damage issues. They came up with a series of credit codes for customer service to use in reporting damage. Then behind the scenes Hubert’s IT department is able to grab that information and put it in the form of a report to feed it back to the company’s process owners, including shipping and packaging. That information goes into a monthly chart that matches those codes to the people who have ownership of those codes.

If it’s a packaging issue, the manager in shipping will often get together with the merchandise manager and product manager who are Hubert’s contacts with vendors. There will then be a three-way conversation on how the company can improve the packaging of the product in question. If they decide on a change then the associates in packing and shipping are retrained accordingly.

Today, what started as a way for Hubert to improve its internal operations has spread to its supply chain partners.

“Once we had all this information we said we need to share this with our suppliers and transportation providers and hope they’ll make changes to improve their processes and eliminate some of these errors,” Lansing told me. “We went this route because we have such a diversity of customers that require customization.”

Hubert also has a diversity of suppliers—about 900 manufacturers located around the world. Hubert holds them accountable for meeting its packaging specs and it audits these companies to make sure they’re meeting those requirements.

So, back to that question: “Are your customers involved in the trust building process?” Maybe building is the wrong word. Hubert’s Tim Lansing cultivates it through a series of internal and external supply chain verifications. Building implies a once and done procedure. Cultivation must be done every season to ensure results. I hope you have a rich harvest.

Postscript: Doug Chovan, principal of Chovan Communications, sent along the following comment in response to this blog post:

Tom,

Great post on the subject of growing trust in the current economy. Especially liked your take on cultivating vs. building trust and that creating trust is not a “once and done” procedure, but an ongoing pursuit. This is especially true in an ever-increasing customer-driven economy. All the more reason B2B companies in particular need to produce a constant flow of high-value content that is also customer-driven.

In their book, Trust Agents, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith note that “the whole world has shifted, knocked off its pillars by the ripples from companies that aren’t treating people as though they’re important, inside or out. The need for trust has grown.”

Cultivating trust is more important than ever before. Shining the spotlight on your most satisfied customers and making them feel important is one of the most powerful and effective ways to do just that.

Doug Chovan

Principal

Chovan Communications, LLC

I’ve heard elitists call community colleges “The 13th Grade,” and in the case of Cuyahoga Community College, or Tri-C, near my home in Cleveland, “Tri-High.” So it was great to hear former British Prime Minister Tony Blair shame those loudmouths by making a personal appearance at this school to help them raise more than $1 million for scholarships.

“Education is the centerpiece for the best social policy,” The Plain Dealer quoted him as saying. He also said that he would never have succeeded without a good education. “It made me have the courage to strive and liberated me in a vital and important way. But once you get an education, it’s up to you and you have to work hard.”

Nobody works harder than the professionals in material handling and logistics, but people like you are also blessed to have an industry association dedicated to ensuring that more people like you keep coming into these disciplines with a good educational grounding. That dedication to education was the focus of an interview I had with the outgoing and incoming CEOs of the Material Handling Industry of America (MHIA).

John Nofsinger recently announced his retirement as of the end of this year and George Prest will succeed him. I thought this would be a good time to find out how this will affect MHIA’s focus and direction.

It turns out that the only way its focus and direction will change is to get stronger—especially where education is concerned. Prest brings more than 30 years of experience to MHIA, both in managing and owning material handling manufacturing companies. Over the years he has been recognized for his volunteer leadership of industry manufacturers and distributor associations, local government and charitable foundations. This leadership includes serving as president of the Material Handling Education Foundation (MHEFI). Prest sees education as the common bond for all the parties MHIA serves.

“Until the beginning of October I was president of MHEFI, a separate organization that stands on its own,” Prest told me. “MHIA will work closely with MHEFI to expand programs.”

MHEFI just added four new board members, including Liz Richards of the Material Handling Equipment Distributors Association (MHEDA); Jim Bowes, CEO at Peach State Integrated Technologies; Sal Fateen, owner of Seizmic Engineering; and Gregg Meyer, president of Albion Industries. Prest said those were strategic moves in that it opened the door to individuals who didn’t necessarily belong to MHIA member companies.

By opening up those new channels of communication, MHIA will also address tough national issues like the skilled labor shortage, which goes hand-in-hand with education, according to Nofsinger.

“Absent someone stepping in to provide some support in the form of education grants and research we’d leave industry on the horns of a dilemma,” he said. “If I can’t get enough humanity to handle, move, protect and control and my options are only to put in advanced automation and technology, and if I’m not profitable enough to sustain that kind of strategy, I’m left with one or two options: offshoring or outsourcing. We lived through that in the last decade and we’re starting to live with some of the shortfalls of that approach today.

“Now we’re seeing a little more nearshoring because people learned the hard way that you don’t want to give up your core competencies easily because you’ll lose a lot of competitive advantage. We’re trying to provide, particularly with our undergraduate work, some critical mass so companies can find sufficient talent in America and to locate their operations in America.”

Prest sees that education effort reaching beyond the college and university levels. He says it needs to start much earlier.

“Our industry touches everything, but few people know that,” he said. “I’m looking at education from grade schools to Ph.D. level. At the Applied Technology Center in Rock Hill, SC. we have a mini warehouse set up and there’s training going on. Young people are learning to install and operate material handling systems for inventory control and picking. We’re also developing research grants to make sure we keep professors engaged in our industry. They will teach the next generation and keep the cycle going.”

Prest concluded that with the evolution of the U.S. economy, necessity will drive material handling invention and the multidisciplinary approach recognizes there is no longer just a single answer.

“[Our companies] work together as an industry much better than before and we’re coming up with solutions together,” he said.

Nofsinger is committed to helping Prest grow into his new responsibilities.

“I’ll provide assistance around the edges to smooth out the succession and transition activities through next year,” he said. “I have no intention of stopping my interest in and support and service to an industry that’s all I’ve ever known.”

Jerry Welcome says the returnable packaging industry is out of its product-minded infancy and entering its rambunctious teenage years of service. That little quote from the president of the Reusable Packaging Association resonated in my memory this morning as I picked through the countless product releases I collected while at Pack Expo last week in Las Vegas. Yeah, there were countless product displays at the Vegas Convention Center, but smart attendees knew that the real value of attending an event like this is in asking what’s going on behind the displays.

Welcome said container manufacturers are taking a more systematic approach to material handling—becoming efficiency experts and examining their customers’ supply chain for solutions. Bob Klimko is a good example. He’s director of marketing for Orbis, a manufacturer of reusable containers, but he’s also the education and technology chair for RPA. He said that not only can these containers change a company’s work environment, but in the long run they can change the world’s environment for the better. But companies must take a holistic view of the supply chain and understand the needs of stakeholders along that chain. Costs may go down for some and up for others. The important thing is that those costs are understood and don’t become surprises.

Vellay Kannappen, director of Supply Chain Planning of Ghirardelli Chocolate, addressed this during his presentation on the use of reusable containers during Pack Expo. Ghirardelli’s challenges were to eliminate waste from product breakage as well as to lower the costs associated with transporting its premium chocolate squares in cardboard boxes. The company had been spending $520,000 a year on 580,000 cardboard boxes for internal distribution. These boxes would get soiled with use and then thrown in the trash—resulting in an additional $2,700 spent on disposal.

The StopWaste Business Waste Prevention Partnership of Almeda County (Oakland, Calif.) assessed Ghirardelli’s operation and identified reusable totes as a potential solution. The Partnership then provided a cost benefit analysis and a $75,000 grant to help offset the large initial investment and get a project rolling.

Results: The chocolate producer reduced 70,000 cases per year and prevented 800 tons of food waste from going to landfills. The company now works with co-packers to fill totes with product. Because the totes can be stacked, chocolate squares are no longer crushed during handling. And by avoiding corrugated, 660 tons of corrugated were reduced at the source.

There are supply chain costs that need to be factored in, however. Those 150,000 totes still need to be stored, transported and cleaned. It also helps that this is a closed loop system and the containers can be more easily tracked. For Ghirardelli it’s been a net win.

Another good example of supply chain partnership was on the show floor, where CHEP, IFCO and CAPS exhibited near one another to demonstrate their new partnership to help customers strengthen their supply chains. CHEP’s parent, Brambles, acquired the other two companies to be able to offer a more complete packaging solution for the supply chain—from pallets to RPCs to crates. This is another example of what Jerry Welcome was talking about: a more of a systems-minded solution than an asset-minded one.

Customers of all three companies can now take advantage of CHEP’s global life cycle and impact testing operations to assess if their products, whether on standard pallets or in customized plastic containers, can survive their supply chains.

After surviving my four-hour no-frills economy-class flight back home from Vegas, I’m thinking the airlines could stand to do some similar research.