2022 Viewpoints: Think, plan, act

This marks the first time that we’ve devoted the majority of the December issue toward putting the past 12 months into perspective. Considering the instability we continue to monitor here at home and around world, the editorial team felt that offering this retrospective approach will help readers plan for what’s sure to be more turbulent months ahead.

And there’s no better contributing editor than Brook Bentz to take pause and neatly encapsulate 2022 for the readers of Logistics Management. Over several decades, Bentz has had a front row seat in the freight transportation arena, early on as a senior railroad and trucking executive and then as a consultant to some of the world’s leading companies.

As Bentz reports, there’s little doubt that logistics and supply chain managers need to stay nimble and flexible as their supply chain operations continue to heal from the profound repercussions inflicted by the pandemic. Indeed, resiliency remains the battle cry for modern logistics professional. However, we need to stick to fundamentals and continue to do everything in our power to push for infrastructure improvement.

“We need to keep in mind that much of supply chain resilience hinges on our infrastructure capabilities, which have suffered from malnutrition for a very long time,” says Bentz. “While there’s been much discussion and effort to make supply chains more resilient, we came to realize the various supply chains were far more brittle than we imagined or hoped for—and those circumstances have not yet resolved themselves to an acceptable level.”

As part of this year in review, group news editor Jeff Berman has combed through hundreds of news posts over the past 12 months and offers his list of the top 10 news stories that shaped 2022. “It’s important to note that this list is not based on analytics or popularity,” he says. “It represents the news that best puts the rollercoaster of events that defined 2022 into perspective—and believe me, the list could have been 40 or 50 this year.”

And much in the same spirit of Berman’s annual exercise, the editorial team has also selected seven features from our pages this year that we believe deserve a second read before we shift gears into 2023. You’ll find a few reoccurring themes, but none stronger than the importance of putting software and technology to work in an effort to maintain and empower an existing working force.

In fact, that technology/labor theme was so prominent this year that we developed our 2022 Virtual Summit around the challenge. So, when you’re done going through this month’s issue, take some time to the attend the event (supplychain247.com/virtual-2022/) that puts today’s game-changing strategies and automated solutions into perspective and offers practical tips for evaluating, implementing and leveraging these tools to streamline operations and retain the workforce necessary to take your operations into the future. It’s now offered on-demand.