Season’s Readings: Inside Supply Management®’s Best of 2024
With 2025 on the horizon, many supply management professionals are anticipating a year of continued economic and geopolitical disruption and evolving sources of supplies, as well as rising tariffs, advancing technologies, opportunities and innovation.
Inside Supply Management® is at the ready to cover all the trends, topics and must-know news impacting supply chains and organizations, as we’ve done in the past. To take you into the next year, we’ve compiled our ninth annual “holiday card” to readers, featuring work from the previous 12 months that we’re most proud of.
These articles from the magazine — available to Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) members — and Inside Supply Management® Weekly e-newsletter as well as ISM’s “Supply Chain — Unfiltered” podcasts (the latter two are available to all) are worth revisiting or discovering.
Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI (gen AI) continued to dominate a conversation that started in earnest in 2023. Inside Supply Management® AI Integration: Need, Want or Hype? (May/June issue) discussed how companies implement the technology will be the difference between value generation versus using it “for the sake of using it.”
The coronavirus pandemic also continued to be a well-discussed topic: Long COVID for Supply Chains (January/February issue) talked about how lessons learned from the pandemic have resulted in positive changes, but lingering challenges remain.
Other hot topics included:
Logistics and transportation. Coverage included the feature, The Intersection of X-Shoring and Logistics (May/June issue), about how nearshoring and reshoring are inspiring organizations to modify transportation networks to save on shipping costs and shorten lead times. Several e-newsletter articles tackled breaking logistics-related news: Dockworkers Strike Will Impact Supply Chains and the Economy, A ‘Significant’ Impact of Baltimore Bridge Collapse and Ocean Shipping Disruptions Emphasize Criticality of Data.
Sustainability and climate change. Read about how the most critical supply chain resource — water — is under threat from climate change and how successes in the Grand Canyon State could be a role model for policy elsewhere in Keeping the Faucet Open (March/April issue). The topics were also popular in the newsletter: Back-to-Back Hurricanes Wreak Havoc on Supply Chains, SEC Ruling Might Slow, But Won’t Stop, Climate Transparency and 3-D Printing: Curbing Carbon One Part at a Time.
Supply chain risk and resilience. Some of most popular articles include the feature Extreme Makeover: Supply Chain Edition (November/December issue), about building supply chains from scratch, and newsletter articles: How US$100 Billion in Supply Chain Goods Disappear Each Year, Future Trade with China Means Greater Vetting of Suppliers and Supply Chains in 2030: Imagining the Future.
In the e-newsletter, the ISM® Report On Business® Roundups continued to gauge reaction to the monthly releases of the Manufacturing PMI®, Services PMI® and Hospital PMI® data, and The Monthly Metric kept examining analytics that help supply managers make critical decisions. And our ISM World 2024 coverage gave a glimpse into what ISM’s Annual Conference is all about.
Among our favorite podcasts:
- Big Agriculture and the Impacts From Farm to Table, with Zak Zeidman, co-founder of ReSeed
- Why Supply Chain Influencers Need Collaborations from Key Stakeholders featuring influencer Charlotte de Brabandt, DBA
- Women in Supply Management: It Takes a Leader to Instill Change, featuring Bindiya Vakil of Resilinc.
Finally, we’d like to express appreciation to talented guest authors who regularly contribute, including de Brabandt, who has written numerous articles about technology; diversity expert Suzanne Weston; John Perez, CPSM, CPSD, whose September/October feature story on dual-use technology you won’t want to miss; and Chris Caplice, Ph.D., chief scientist at DAT Freight & Analytics and senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Transportation and Logistics.
Also: international leadership and cultural change strategists Mandy Flint and Elisabet Vinberg Hearn, authors of Inside Supply Management®’s Last Word on Leadership column; members of IBM’s Procurement Analytics as a Service team who contribute monthly data, analytics and technology articles; and Boston Consulting Group partners, managing directors and colleagues who regularly contribute to both the magazine and e-newsletter.
At midday on December 24, ISM begins its end-of-year close; we’ll be back on January 2. The next e-newsletter will release on January 7.
When the staff of Inside Supply Management® returns to work, we’ll put the finishing touches on a January/February issue that is annually one of our favorites. It’s our yearly economic outlook issue, with an overview of the U.S. economy and feature articles on the continuing impacts of tariffs, what supply chains could look like in the next five years, and a look at procurement through the lens of college football.
We wish you a happy and safe holiday season. See you in 2025.