The spinning of campaign propaganda is the ugliest part of politics. Unfortunately, this being a presidential election year, the webs of deception being spun are unavoidable. The candidates are busy trying to trap each other in lies and half-truths. They often succeed. But politicians don’t have a monopoly on such gamesmanship. It’s part of business too, especially in supply chain management.

Take supply chain mapping, for example. I’m reading a cool new book on this process, titled “Seeing the Whole Value Stream,” by Dan Jones and Steve Womack and published by the Lean Enterprise Institute. They define the mapping process as “directly observing the flows of information and materials as they now occur, summarizing them visually, and then envisioning a future state with much better performance.”

That’s what politicians should be doing, isn’t it? “Envisioning a future state with much better performance?” The difference on the business side is that the sausage-making process designed to get them there is more hidden—although just as ugly. The authors illustrate this in a section of their book that addresses the role of the product line manager (PLM). Just as our presidential candidates have to build campaign teams, PLMs need a good eye for the multidisciplinary talent responsible for producing and distributing their sausage—er, product. But here’s where business politics can get ugly.

The authors don’t like the idea of a “product team” structure, where engineering, operations, purchasing and marketing employees collaborate on a team. They write that “doing this causes a large amount of organizational disruption during the transition and this structure still does not address the behavior of upstream partner firms.” For them, it’s up to the PLM to take mapping responsibility by taking an “energetic approach” to the job.

The funny thing about this is an admission the authors make about such a PLM: “The very managers most able to benefit from [this book] don’t currently exist in many firms!”

So where will today’s value stream mapping leaders come from? Let’s consider purchasing.

In my last blog I quoted Ralph Rupert, manager of unit load technology for Millwood, specialists in palletization and product unitization. He said procurement needs to be part of the shipping and fulfillment team, but that procurement is often structured as silos within a silo, with purchasing agents assigned to different pieces of a product—kind of like the committee responsible for inventing the camel. Well, the authors of this book give another reason to be careful about involving procurement, at least in a leadership role, and that’s what got me to thinking about the politics of supply chain management.

“Assigning a buyer from purchasing to be a mapping leader can lead to problems if upstream participants believe that the real purpose of mapping will be to uncover waste at suppliers, followed by demands for immediate price reductions.”

Any PLM hearing such a cynical accusation from a supplier might either get angry or be hurt. A politician might feel complimented for the recognition of his brilliant strategy.

If your company is developing a new product, I recommend reviewing books like this one to get a feel for selecting the best candidates to serve in your value stream. And remember, this isn’t politics. When vetting the candidates, ignore their spawning habits.

The interconnected nature of global supply chains makes companies vulnerable to thousands of weak links—also known as suppliers. A new report released by World Economic Forum in collaboration with Accenture, called “New Models for Addressing Supply Chain and Transport Risk,” notes that businesses “both affect and are affected by risks at various stages, from the sourcing of raw materials to the destinations of goods and services.”

Weak links don’t just affect your financial performance, but they can damage your company’s reputation as well. You might not have much direct control over those weak links outside your organization, but a major influencer works inside it and is often left out of supply chain decisions. It’s your procurement department.

One of the recommendations this report has for businesses is to explicitly assess supply chain and transport risks as part of procurement.

This caught my attention because I just interviewed Ralph Rupert, manager of unit load technology for Millwood, specialists in palletization and product unitization. We discussed how packaging and unitization can be a hidden cause of product quality problems. Rupert is also chair of the MH1 Pallet Standard Committee and was director of the Center for Unit Load Design at Virginia Tech. He says procurement needs to be part of a system when it comes to shipping and fulfillment. Problems arise when procurement is not only splintered from supply chain management, but splintered within its own structure.

Take bottled water for example. The plastic in these bottles is now so thin it no longer contributes to the packaging’s structural integrity. Some recent store-level unit load failures dramatized the problem.

“One purchasing agent may be in charge of buying the bottles or buying the corrugated,” Rupert told me. “Another is buying pallets and another is purchasing the multi-million dollar handling systems and those purchasing agents and the teams they represent don’t talk to each other.”

The contribution these disconnects make to supply chain failure is often overlooked, and this not only damages product, but company reputations, as well. It’s also damaging to a company’s sustainability strategy. But the reason this problem is perpetual is the procurement pros at work in their silos get rewarded for the low costs they pull down.

The resulting product damage is seldom traced to purchasing.

“You open the back of the trailer and find things damaged and the first instinct is to redesign the package,” Rupert says. “But maybe if they would have spent a little more money and gotten a better pallet it wouldn’t have transmitted the vibration into the package and caused the damage in the first place.”

There are plenty of scary supply chain risks out in the world today. The good thing is you can see them. Sometimes your supply chain’s worst enemy is invisible—and lives in your own little world.

Last week the captain of the Costa Concordia cruise ship managed to crash both the vessel and his career on the rocks off the coast of Italy. How could this happen? This vacation-on-water had all the latest electronic gizmos to keep itself and its passengers out of harm’s way.

As the Titanic taught us 100 years ago, nothing’s more dangerous than believing in the infallibility of man.

There was a good column in the Wall Street Journal this weekend titled “The Dangers of Safety.” The author’s contention is that advances in safety technology, like football helmets that protect from concussions and parachutes that protect from late deployment, give their wearers a false sense of security, therefore these people do stupid things from which the equipment won’t protect them. The author’s conclusion: “Sometimes the safest way to live is to be a little afraid.”

Reading the newspaper is a good way to live in fear. This weekend’s read taught me a new syndrome to avoid: the “risk compensation effect.” We all have anti-lock brakes on our cars, but studies have shown that knowing this has caused drivers to do things they wouldn’t have done without them—like drive faster and brake later.

There are corollaries in the material handling world—lift trucks, for example. Some have built-in stability systems to sense unsafe loads, others have speed governors, all have seat belts, etc., etc. Using the logic of the risk compensation effect, you’d think we’d see a gradual rise in lift truck accidents and deaths. But no.

OSHA data over the years have shown pretty consistent numbers. Injury and death rates are high, but they’ve stayed pretty flat. Stats indicate that the three most common forklift-related fatalities involve overturns, pedestrians being struck by forklifts, and workers falling from forklifts. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) concludes that the consistent fatalities indicate that “many workers and employers are not using or may be unaware of safety procedures and the proper use of forklifts to reduce the risk of injury and death.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that each year in the United States, nearly 100 workers are killed and another 20,000 are seriously injured in forklift-related incidents. And according to the National Traumatic Occupational Fatalities (NTOF) Surveillance System, in the United States, 1,021 workers died from traumatic injuries suffered in forklift-related incidents between 1980 and 1994. Broken down by year, that’s an average of 85 fatalities—not to mention 34,902 serious injuries and 61,800 non-serious injuries—each year.

But could this be a glass-half-full kind of thing? Maybe the reason the numbers aren’t rising each year is that the safety technology keeps lift trucks fool-proof to a point. Of course one could argue that employers aren’t adequately training employees about the safety features and capabilities of these vehicles—therefore the operators don’t know enough to exhibit the risk-compensation effect by ratcheting up those numbers.

Maybe it’s both. According to OSHA the top five citations issued for 29CFR1910.178 are:

• Failure to ensure operator competency

• Failure to certify operator’s training and evaluation

• Failure to provide refresher training and evaluation

• Failure to examine forklifts before placing them in service

• Failure to take damaged forklifts out of service.

Risk compensation syndrome might be displacing attention deficit disorder as pop psychology’s favorite trend, but to have it, you have to know what you’re being protected from. That’s a trend more material handlers should risk following.

When prosecutors look for ways to build a solid case against a criminal, drugs and guns found at a crime scene usually grab their attention. But there’s another piece of evidence that often goes unnoticed at the outset of a case: pallets.

I’m talking about plastic pallets. As the value of plastics continues to rise, so does the theft of not only pallets, but reusable plastic containers, as well. Consider these numbers associated with theft of plastic assets:

• It costs businesses upwards of $500 million every year nationwide, according to the International Dairy Foods Association. Dairy companies alone lose nearly $80 million a year to plastic milk crate theft.

• Arizona businesses lose up to $3 million a year from the theft of pallets.

• In May 2011, Los Angeles authorities recovered more than 15,000 stolen plastic containers, worth nearly $1.3 million.

• In Maryland, four businesses combined lost nearly $6 million from plastic pallet theft in 2008.

• In San Bernardino County in 2010 one company claimed a $2.5 million loss from stolen plastic loading pallets.

• The U.S. Postal Service paid roughly $50 million last year to replace lost and stolen equipment, including plastic letter trays and tubs.

We’ve blogged about the USPS’s efforts to recover their pallets via amnesty programs, but they’ve been only marginally successful. Part of that is because stolen plastic pallets and containers often end up at recycler sites where they are ground up into resin that commands a nice market price. Success depends on better cooperation among supply chain partners further up that chain.

According to Al Farrell, there’s a large recycling complex of grinders in this country thanks to the growth of recycling programs. Farrell’s vice president of asset management for iGPS, a plastic-pallet pooling company. Like any population, the recycling community is made up of good and bad citizens. It’s the bad ones that cost iGPS and other asset owners lots of money. But it’s not only money that makes this issue worth your attention as a good citizen. Farrell says pallets are often the tip of a crime iceberg.

“The crime of plastic grinding and theft is often accompanied by other crimes,” he told me. “It may be drug related, it may be commerce of other stolen goods.”

Why haven’t we heard more about pallet busts?

“Prosecutors take on cases because they believe they’re winnable,” he answers. “Law enforcement can understand large amounts of stereo equipment, but when talking plastic pallets, there’s not the full recognition that this is a crime that should be prosecuted. Many jurisdictions are underfunded right now and this gets pushed down into the no-interest category.”

That is starting to change as asset owners and technology companies in industrial supply chains build a strong case for traceability.

“We need to get prosecutors to understand these are cases they can actually win,” Farrell says. “We do a lot of education that these are uniquely serialized assets and we can prove each has a unique identity and that we own it. We never sell it or part company with it, except to go into the supply chain under a rental agreement. RFID plays a key role in our being able to demonstrate this is our property.”

That message is gaining traction. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Task Force has already busted a grinding group that on the lower floor was grinding plastic and other materials from stolen goods while on the upper floor was a grow-house for marijuana. Farrell says this task force has also busted up grinding operations that had meth labs connected to gangs and organized crime.

Fifty years ago, who in the material handling industry could have imagined that pallets would one day provide a solid base upon which law enforcement agencies could build a case against thugs and gangsters?

It’s time to start imagining it happening inside your own supply chain. If you rent plastic pallets and containers, make sure they return to their owner. If you own them, protect them with serialization. If you find some strays with another owner’s name on them, let that owner know. And if you learn that your supply chain has been using lost or stolen material handling assets for quite some time, report it to your local authorities. You may be instrumental in solving a bigger problem than you realize.

High-tech giant Apple has long had a love/hate relationship with its customers and suppliers. The company loves to publicize how popular its products are with its customers, who are nothing if not rabidly passionate about everything-Apple. However, the company also hates to publicize exactly who makes it products, since that information tends to raise uncomfortable questions, such as: Why does the classic American success story offshore its manufacturing to Chinese factories where suicides, slave labor and environmental abuses have been documented?

Yes, Apple frequently shows up on lists of the most popular, most trusted or most valuable companies, largely because its best-known products have a perceived cachet to them that competitive products simply do not have. Most recently, Interbrands positioned Apple as number 8 in its list of the Best Global Brands of 2011, a jump of 9 spots from its position a year ago, one of the biggest upward moves among the top 100 brands; Amazon climbed 10 spots, but that put it no higher than number 26. (For the record, by the way, the top 7 spots remain unchanged from 2010, with Coke still on top. For Apple to move into the top 10, obviously somebody had to drop out, and that company is Nokia, which has its own problems, as noted here.)

Despite the numerous accolades, Apple has seen its image tarnished through nobody’s fault but its own, namely, the way it manages (or mismanages) its overseas suppliers. Apple released its 2012 Supplier Responsibility progress report just before the long holiday weekend (a time when companies typically announce unflattering news, hoping it’ll get buried), which among other things paints a not-so-rosy picture of labor conditions throughout the Chinese plants that manufacture iPhones, iPads and other high-tech devices for Apple. The company also released a list of its major offshore suppliers.

There’s some thought that Apple, as well as other California-based electronics companies, has been more-or-less dragged kicking and screaming into revealing the practices of its suppliers. For instance, on New Year’s Day, the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act went into effect, which requires all companies with sales of $100 million or more and that do business in the state to publicly disclose what they’re doing to ensure their global supply chains do not in any way support or enable slave labor or human trafficking. Among other things, companies must now comply with various audits of their vendors and suppliers, and publicize their efforts on their websites. Which is what Apple has done, warts and all.

According to Apple’s progress report, almost two-thirds (62%) of the suppliers that it uses do not comply with Apple’s limit of 60 hours per week in the factory, with at least one day of rest per seven days. “Working hours is a complex issue,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal, adding that he is confident that by monitoring its suppliers’ plants at a “very, very micro level,” Apple will be able to improve the situation.

More than a third (35%) of the suppliers do not meet Apple’s standards for workplace safety, the report notes, and nearly a third (32%) are not in compliance with Apple’s hazmat management practices.

The WSJ also notes that “the supplier report could pique Chinese authorities, who have long sought to stem criticism and limit disclosures about business practices there.” And indeed, Foxconn, one of the most notorious Chinese suppliers, is cited several times in Apple’s reports for various infractions, such as a combustible dust explosion that killed four people and injured 18.

To diminish any suggestion that Apple’s global standards are somewhat, well, sub-standard, the company has joined the Fair Labor Association as an associate member, the first high-tech company to do so. In a press release, it was announced that “the FLA will independently assess facilities in Apple’s supply chain and report detailed findings on the FLA website.” However, the FLA has been criticized in the past for receiving funding from companies it monitors, which of course would be a conflict of interest. So Apple would do well to increase its transparency to its stakeholders beyond the disclosures it has no choice but to release.

If there were a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange called “Your Supply Chain,” your broker would probably urge you to stay away from it. Too risky. And many corporate executives across the country agree—their supply chains are risky. According to a survey by McKinsey & Co. of more than 600 C-level executives across a range of industries worldwide, more than two thirds of respondents said that supply-chain risk had increased over the last three years, and they expected it to continue increasing over the next five years—especially in the following areas:

• Global competition

• Complex patterns of customer demand

• Financial volatility

• Global markets for labor and talent

• Exposure to differing regulatory requirements

• Environmental concerns

A quarter of the respondents to the McKinsey study said they aren’t prepared for more pressure from global competition and more complex customer demand patterns. And 37 percent are unprepared for the other four areas. More recently, Dr. Jeff Karrenbauer, president of INSIGHT, a supply chain analytics and consulting service firm, commented on the effects of rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran.

“Open conflict in the Strait of Hormuz would be a nightmare for supply chains throughout the world, raising the cost of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, inventory…essentially every component of a supply chain,” he said. “We still find that the majority of companies have spent little or no time planning for such contingencies. That is astounding, troubling and frankly, a significant management failure.”

So it’s in that light I wanted to share a little more from my conversation from last week with Jim Malvaso, retiring president and CEO of Toyota Material Handling North America. We talked about a meeting President Obama had with a group of executives who want to bring jobs back to the U.S. The President promised them he would include a tax break in next year’s budget if they would bring the jobs they’ve been outsourcing to other countries back to the U.S. That would make U.S. supply chains more secure, wouldn’t it?

“I’ve brought jobs back to the U.S. and never asked for anything nor do I expect anything,” Malvaso told me. “It’s the right thing to do for the country. There’s a lot more to it than Obama taking other people’s money and throwing it at companies to bring jobs back here. We have tax policies where we have the second highest corporate tax rate in the world. Individual tax rates are out of sight. Look at the restrictions we have on expansions. Look what they did with Boeing. It was creating thousands of jobs in South Carolina and he made it tremendously difficult.”

He’s referring to the government’s efforts to keep Boeing from locating a new production facility in South Carolina. Many point to the influence of the National Labor Relations Board for that action. But where unions are concerned, those same critics cite them as the reason companies have outsourced labor to other countries in the first place. And where China is concerned, it is connected to several of the supply chain risks listed in the McKinsey study. Malvaso says The U.S. and its corporate citizens need to take responsibility for securing its supply chains from such threats.

“We need a total environment change and that means not just spending our way out of poor policies and poor decisions,” he said. “The World Trade Organization needs to get involved and if China wants to have a world market they need to value their currency properly.”

And industry must value its products properly, as well. Referring to the U.S. industrial truck market in particular, Malvaso said it’s in a position to set a good example for the value of its products and services.

“We bring value to the entire supply chain throughout the world,” he said. “Nothing moves without us. It pains me to see how little value [the industrial truck industry] puts on our own products and services. I hope we come to our senses regardless of how competitive it is and keep the value in this industry up where it belongs. [Where Toyota is concerned] I’m confident Brett Wood and the management team I’m leaving behind will do a great job for our company and I’ll sleep well at night.”

I hope you’ll be able to say the same thing about your successors and your sleep, dear readers.

When I was a kid I believed that only Superman could fly faster than a speeding bullet. Now that I’m halfway into my 50s and any remaining innocence and idealism is quickly oozing out of me, I’ve come to realize that the only thing that can fly faster than a speeding bullet is a promise during a presidential election year.

I read in this morning’s paper that President Obama spoke before a group of American executives in charge of companies that are starting to bring jobs back to the U.S. The President promised these execs he would include tax breaks for such “in-sourcing” in the fiscal 2013 budget plan to be sent to Congress next month.

“I want us to be known for making and selling products all over the world stamped with three proud words: ‘Made in America,’” he said.

That’s a great sound bite, but we’ll see if it turns out to be the President’s legacy or just another broken campaign promise. In the meantime, American manufacturers like those who heard the President’s promise can always take comfort that although their made-in-America products are more expensive, they’re also better quality—right?

That consolation is as viable as a political promise these days.

Product quality isn’t that hard to accomplish. There are software providers who can make it possible for companies anywhere in the world to monitor manufacturing quality in plants anywhere in the world.

I saw a press release from a company called InfinityQS International, Inc., providers of quality control software, and they’re expanding their international presence too. In fact like President Obama, this company’s president & CEO, Michael Lyle, is taking on speaking engagements around the world, extolling the value of statistical process control (SPC) software for manufacturers. His company presented in China recently, telling manufacturers there how they could enhance their level of quality control.

The press release quotes him as saying “When considering that Chinese manufacturers account for nearly 20 percent of all manufactured goods—the most in the world—it is imperative for quality best practices to take precedence on the plant floor, throughout the enterprise and across the supply chain.”

I followed up with him to ask if American companies establishing a presence in China are raising the quality bar for manufacturers in China.

“We have clients that are tracking, via internet connection from their headquarters in the United States, real-time process data originating from manufacturing facilities in China,” he answered. “When quality issues occur, key personnel in both countries are immediately notified so the adverse events can be resolved rapidly, mitigating their effect and cost on production.”

Shortly after I had this conversation, I saw another press release announcing the retirement of Jim Malvaso from his post as president and CEO of Toyota Material Handling North America (TMHNA). I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Jim several times in the past few years, and he’s always had strong opinions about the challenges of competing with Chinese manufacturers on our soil and theirs.

I called him to ask what his plans were for retirement, knowing that he’d maintain a consulting role at Toyota as they grow their global markets. I’ll share with you my full conversation with Jim in my next blog post, but I wanted to conclude this post with his take on the role of manufacturing in the economy. He says manufacturers in many industries, including lift trucks, often stress product quality but fail to emphasize the value of strong service and support.

“There is a significant tendency for customers to take advantage of the economy where supply exceeds demand and manufacturers often respond by undervaluing not only their product but the services and expertise that come along with it,” he told me. “I think our industry is acting way too much as commodity sellers. Our material handling products go far beyond a commodity. We need to recapture the value proposition that made this industry valuable to our customer base.”

I hope the manufacturing executives who heard President Obama’s promise to reward manufacturers for bringing jobs back to the U.S. will capitalize on that promise by rewarding their own organizations for making top-level service and support equal partners with manufacturing quality.

In my last blog I was dismissive of a new shipping service some college kids are trying to get off the ground. I complained that I couldn’t even get onto their website, and surmised they must be having trouble selling their concept.

I owe these kids an apology. www.SendwithMe.com is a working website–it just took a few minutes for it to come up on my screen. I still think the concept is a bit weird, though. They want to build off the perception that the efficiency-poor U.S. Postal Service is on its last legs and that FedEx drivers regularly and literally toss parcels over the recipient’s fence. (YouTube got a lot of hits showing that particular service offering).

Well, even if these kids’ idea of providing an online tool to match up parcel shippers with airline passengers willing to deliver those parcels through the last mile to a recipient seems absurd from a practical perspective, I’m starting to think they may have a future being impractical. Forget realism. Think reality TV.

A&E is introducing a brand new reality show this week called “Shipping Wars,” which follows six independent shippers who’ve discovered that fortunes could be made transporting items traditional carriers won’t touch. Here’s how A&E’s press release describes their series:

“Each episode of “Shipping Wars” dives into the cutthroat world of these heavy-duty movers as they battle for the chance to transport the unshippable. The competition begins with uShip, the world’s largest online auction house for independent truckers. Every day, thousands of shipments are put up for auction. The battle is fierce as the movers have only minutes to bid, and the lowest bidder gets the load.”

The show’s wow factor lies in these carriers struggling with crazy oversized loads and bulky packages—as long as the price is right. “The high-stakes race is on as they set out to deliver the loads in time, and any setback can cost big bucks,” A&E exclaims.

Sounds a little like the same kind of service the SendWithMe kids are offering, but with a lot more drama. So I apologize to student entrepreneur Raaheela Ahmed, the startup’s CEO, for mocking her idea. She just didn’t take her concept far enough. She should have sold it to a cable network first.

Maybe if Shipping Wars takes off, the SendWithMe folks can capitalize on it by pitching the idea of a parcel version with a wacky bunch of passengers trying to get suspicious looking packages through airport security while withstanding the withering glares of business travelers delayed by TSA’s airport shutdowns. Giant cuckoo clocks tick just like bombs, after all.

I think SendWithMe has MustSeeTV written all over it. Then again, last year in this space I tried pitching “Forklifter,” the story of an itinerant lift truck operator who gets called to different industry sites to solve supply chain crises. The hook: this expert is really an OSHA spy, seeking out willful safety scofflaws.

I was kidding around at the time, but in light of Shipping Wars, I think the SendWithMe kids and I could have hits on our hands. How about a package deal, A&E?

I’ve been talking to seasoned logistics professionals lately about their strategies to overcome the limitations of their local transportation infrastructures. Their work is inspiring.

For example, Alastair Smith, senior director of operations for the Port of Vancouver, is faced with handling 5 million tons of cargo every year. However, he expects that volume to triple by 2020, thanks to growth in the Asian agricultural markets his organization serves. To prepare the Port for that growth his organization is improving rail access in and out as well as deepening the waterway serving the Port so it will be able to accommodate larger ocean vessels.

“We’ve been working for the last 4-5 years in our West Vancouver freight access rail development program to complete a new access into the port that instead of crossing the main line we’ll go underneath,” he told me. “You can imagine with the amount of traffic that crosses a mainline, taking all that traffic off of it helps not only the port but overall efficiencies in the Pacific Northwest. So we have gotten strong support from the railroads and from the departments of transportation in the Pacific Northwest.”

Meanwhile, in the Southeast, Jim Hertwig, president and CEO at Florida East Coast Railway and former president at CSX Intermodal, is working on improving the rail service to the Port of Miami. He told me he’s expecting Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant money to help restore on-dock rail at the port. It’s a $50 million project of which his organization is putting in $11 million and federal, state and local funds will take care of the balance. The project will upgrade the track going down to the port.

The big problem is, with Miami being more consumers than producers, most trucks go in full and come back empty. Jim’s organization came up with an online tool for brokers to find a truck, book a truck, and through a drayage operation between Jacksonville and Miami, provide pickup and delivery for one rate just like a truckload carrier. Bottom line, the service provides the economic benefit of a backhaul.

These gentlemen have paid many years of dues to get to this point in the careers. That’s why it was kind of jarring to get a press release this week from a high school graduate describing her vision for overcoming the logistics limitations of the U.S. Postal Service. Raaheela Ahmed describes herself as a student entrepreneur. The need she and her fellow students saw was to replace the delays and poor handling of the USPS and FedEx with www.SendwithMe.com, an online database that allows its members to do one of two things:

• post their availability to carry materials from one place to another while they travel as passengers by air;

• search for a traveler to carry materials from one place to another.

Once a match is found, it is up to the service provider (the person carrying the materials) and the service user (the person sending the materials) to coordinate all the details, like picking up/dropping off, price for the service, etc. The core team behind SendwithMe consists of four college students and their “experienced mentors.” These students attend different schools in the state of Maryland.

Their release concludes with the following caveat:

“www.SendwithMe.com only acts as a platform for introducing members and does not partake in the actual discussion or agreements of the delivery of goods between members. Any illegal use of this site is prohibited by SendwithMe.”

Think that will scare miscreants from abusing this system? I wish these kids luck, but their venture doesn’t look like it’s off to a good start. I tried going to their website and found nothing but white space. Maybe it’s under construction. If so, I recommend they use the downtime productively by networking with guys like Alastair Smith and Jim Hertwig—logisticians who are relying on other logisticians to solve supply chain shortcomings.

Besides, as a frequent traveler, I don’t relish the idea of being in the middle of the www.sendwithMe supply chain as one of their “carriers” tries to get his “delivery” through the same TSA line I’m in. I can hear him now: “No, really, that’s just a nerf bazooka, sir.”

Welcome to a new year of opportunities to restore the weak links in your suit of shining armor. January gives each of us as individuals an opportunity to work on those links, but rarely do we have anybody breathing down our necks to complete our repairs. That’s why many such efforts fail by February.

But you, as a supply chain professional, are equipped to be better with resolutions. You’re probably part of many such efforts during the course of any year. And if you’re not, at least you’re exposed to success stories that will inspire your future efforts. Let me start your year with a good one I just read about in the Wall Street Journal— and kudos to the Journal for joining us in recognizing supply chain excellence.

The spotlight falls on Boeing in this case. Demand for more fuel efficient jets, and more jets in general to provide more service into Asia and the Middle East, is putting pressure on this aircraft manufacturer to speed up and improve its own manufacturing processes as well as those of its suppliers. To do that, it is sending out teams of supply chain experts to the sites of its suppliers to supervise and consult with them to improve their quality and efficiency.

Boeing wants to avoid the problems it had the last time it ramped up production during the introduction of its first 787 Dreamliners. The WSJ story concluded that Boeing wants its supply chain to learn from a time when it delivered the first of these new jets more than three years late—“because of [Boeing’s] failure to carefully manage its supply chain early on.”

But here’s a question WSJ didn’t answer: what does Boeing intend to do with the aircraft these new jets are replacing? Boeing has already positioned itself as a Corporate Citizen, dedicated to environmental stewardship. In its 2011 Environmental Report, Boeing said it has made major changes in contracting language and expanded the use of environmental criteria in evaluating and selecting suppliers.

“Besides being able to provide high-quality aerospace parts on time and within budget, we also look to our suppliers to maximize the use of recycled materials, minimize hazardous waste, conserve energy and prevent pollution,” the report reads. “In addition, we launched a pilot program to include environmental reviews as a standard part of Boeing’s ongoing quality inspections at suppliers.”

Your supply chain doesn’t have to make airplanes to make an environmental difference. There are new potential partners sprouting up to help you. One that’s just getting the word out about itself is Repurposed Materials, which is dedicated to searching all industrial supply chains for byproducts that could be candidates for “repurposing.”

The company defines “repurposed materials” as those that have value “as is” to a second, unrelated industry. If it determines there is a “repurpose” market for an asset, it then negotiates the transfer of said asset for eventual re-sale to its customer base.

Examples include old conveyor belts turned into floor matting for work areas, used rubber roofing membrane made into pond liners, retired wine barrels “repurposed” as trash cans and old street sweeper brushes offering comfort to livestock as back scratchers.

Maybe the economy-class seats from some of those retired jetliners can be repurposed as easy chairs—for our daughters’ dollhouses.

Just kidding, Boeing. Kinda.