T. Boone Pickens to keynote Annual Global Conference

Is your supply chain being held captive by the price of oil? Can natural gas help? The iconic energy executive T. Boone Pickens thinks so.

Pickens and Clean Energy CEO Andrew Littlefair will kick off CSCMP's Annual Global Conference (September 30 to October 3 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA) by looking at the current state of global energy supply, America's oil crisis, and how domestic natural gas could replace diesel and gasoline, bringing competitiveness and prosperity for the trucking industry.

The conference's closing presentation will feature motivational speaker Erik Wahl's creative and entertaining presentation, "The Art of Vision." Wahl will show how breakthrough thinking leads to extraordinary results and will identify ways to utilize unconventional wisdom to build a strategic vision for the future.

In addition to the opening and closing keynotes, the conference will include educational sessions, roundtable discussions, exhibits, networking opportunities, and distribution facility tours. For example, the 24 educational session tracks will cover a wide range of topics, such as managing innovation in technology, supply chain ideas that changed the world, talent and leadership, and how to manage capital-intensive supply chains, to name just a few.

Other special events include the 2012 Educators Conference, the Supply Chain of the Future exhibition, and full-day, pre-conference workshops. The four workshops will include: Building and Maintaining Business Relationships;
Leveraging Supply Chain Management for Enterprise Development;
Supply Chain Risk Mitigation;
and The "New" Fundamentals of Supply Chain Management: What Matters Now.

A new offering this year is the "Women at Work Panel: Power Up Your Supply Chain Management Career," a fresh and honest perspective on the challenges facing women in today's corporate supply chain environment and how to overcome them. Speakers will discuss how women's roles, relationships, and responsibilities have changed in the field, and the skills women need to transition into leadership positions.

For the first time, CSCMP is offering discounted registration rates to active, retired, and civilian U.S. military personnel. Additionally, 10 percent of the proceeds from military registrations will go to the "Wounded Warrior Project," a program that provides services for and raises awareness of the needs of injured service members.

For more information about CSCMP's Annual Global Conference, click here.

Three new research projects investigate current hot topics

Since its inception, the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals has helped to guide and fund cutting-edge research to advance supply chain management practices. Currently CSCMP has three major research projects under way, with results to be published later this year. They include:

Offshoring Trends and Directions. This research initiative studies trends in offshoring and identifies the criteria currently being used to make offshoring decisions.

Supply Chain Management Talent Development. This research is exploring best practices in supply chain management talent development and retention.

Organizing Supply Chains in a Time of Change. Supply chain management organizations can be organized in a variety of ways, with different reporting arrangements, functional scope, and coordination structures. This research will ascertain whether certain business conditions make some supply chain organizations more effective than others.The three research teams will each provide a preview of their results at the Annual Global Conference in Atlanta.

To make members aware of these and other research efforts, CSCMP has launched a new publication, CSCMP Hot Topics. In two to four pages, Hot Topics highlights new research and insights or revisits older research topics that have reemerged as critical issues. The first issue of CSCMP Hot Topics covers the organization's offshoring research. To learn more about this publication, go to cscmp.org, and under the Member Only menu, select Hot Topics.

CSCMP On-Site Education comes to you!

Professional education of supply chain management talent has become a critical need for companies that want to maximize employee performance. Yet it's hard for employees at all levels to take extended time away from their daily responsibilities. For companies facing this challenge, CSCMP On-Site Education is a cost-efficient and timely solution.

Thanks to its global membership and relationships with educators and leading practitioners worldwide, CSCMP can provide educational workshops and seminars at any company location or facility anywhere in the world. This can significantly reduce or eliminate travel time and costs, create an efficient in-house educational experience, and enhance team building while staff learns together.

Curricula can be created for any type of organization, function, location, market, or industry. Organizations can choose an established CSCMP on-site workshop or develop a program that meets the business needs of an individual enterprise. Established on-site workshops cover change management, fundamentals of supply chain management, global supply chain management, SCM collaboration, relationship management, and strategic issues. Education levels range from introductory to intermediate and advanced.

On-Site Education programs qualify for one SCPro continuing education unit (CEU) per one hour of instruction. (Learn more about CSCMP's SCPro Certification at cscmpcertification.org.)

To discuss how CSCMP can deliver targeted education to your organization, contact Director of Education & Research Kathleen Hedland at khedland@cscmp.org, or call +1 630.645.3463.

CSCMP Explores... looks at humanitarian logistics

The United Nations believes that the global demand for humanitarian assistance will continue to rise. The reasons: escalating conflicts and a dramatic increase in vulnerabilities caused by financial crises, increasing food scarcity and prices, insufficiency of energy and water, and the increased severity of disasters.

Supply chain management plays a critical role in helping governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) address those problems. Accordingly, Humanitarian Relief: Broken Supply Chains and Role of the Private Sector, the latest publication in the CSCMP Explores... series of booklets, investigates how logistics and supply chain professionals can play a role in filling important gaps in the humanitarian supply chain.

Topics in the CSCMP Explores... series focus on practical, real-world information that can inform day-to-day decisions and help prepare readers to handle the uncertainties of today's economy. Issues alternate between in-depth coverage of supply chain topics and case studies that showcase best practices and lessons learned from implementations.

For more information, go to: cscmp.org/memberonly/explores.asp.