Why Can’t We Take Advantage?

Jun. 7 | One of the more impressive things I learned during our recently concluded Supply Chain Immersion in Bacolod is the use of drones to apply fertilizer to growing sugar cane.   Well, all right, it’s not really impressive in a ground-breaking way,...

Romance and Reality

May. 25 | There’s a degree of romance whenever one talks about Negros. You think of how the island became the nerve center of the Philippine sugar industry. You read about how Europeans travelled there to establish plantations, lured by the promise of fertile...

Belt and Road Anxieties

May. 17 | On the surface, China’s Belt and Road Initiative is incredibly ambitious: a large infrastructure program cutting across the regional superpower and beyond, fostering trade linkages between it and its neighbors. The initiative’s name echoes the old...

Lingering Reminders

Apr. 30 | I write this column on the morning of April 23, less than 24 hours after Luzon was hit by an earthquake that shook both our structures and our fears. Is this the Big One? Is the Big One yet to come? Are we ready?   Sometimes it feels we aren’t,...

Unified

Apr. 14 | Now, forgive me for my simplistic understanding of these concepts. While I work with the supply chain sector I am approaching this from the viewpoint of the consumer, the guy who benefits from all of this.   My understanding is this: what works in...

What Will You Do Next?

Apr. 1 | Perhaps some of us with a career in supply chain are still wary about what the future has in store for us. With new technologies continuing to disrupt proceedings, is it safe to say that machines will take over what we do and we’ll be out of a job in,...

Bridging the Gap

Mar. 16 | In the past few months we’ve been pondering the question of developing new talent in supply chain. I’ve been hearing complaints all over: companies are looking to expand their operations but find that they are having difficulty getting the right people...

Build the ecosystem

Mar. 3 | One of the questions raised during the recently concluded 10th Philippine Ports and Shipping 2019 seemed easier to answer than it actually is: why did the Davao-Bitung RORO route not take off?   It’s easy to point at how the route proved to be...

Ponder This

Feb. 17 | If there’s one point we were happy to see reiterated at our Supply Chain Outlook event over a week ago, it was the bigger role supply chain plays in improving lives, a role that goes beyond delivering goods to the customer.   During his keynote...

Knock-on Effects

Feb. 2 | The Philippine economy performed below expectations in 2018. Gross domestic product grew by only 6.2% in the past year, slower than the government’s target growth range of between 6.5 and 6.9%.   The government itself has conceded that record inflation...