by Elizabeth Hines | Mar 23, 2017 | Big Data, Blog, Current Events, Data/Analytics, Internet of Things, Logistics, Manufacturing & Distribution, Strategy, Supply Chain, Talent, Warehousing & Materials Handling
Our series by MBA students and graduates at Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics highlights some of the most pressing issues in supply chain management today.
A few years ago, the Wall Street Journal called supply chain management the “hot new MBA.” Many universities have been introducing related degree programs, majors, and concentrations in response to a growing demand for new hires with supply chain expertise. Graduates of these programs are heavily recruited by employers, which is helping to attract ambitious, young talent to the industry.
Fronetics had the opportunity to collaborate with some of these rising stars by inviting MBA students from the University of New Hampshire Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics to author guest posts on our blog. They covered a variety of pertinent topics, from the Internet of Things and Big Data to pet food and Chipotle. Their pieces are summarized below.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be partnering with another MBA class at UNH to author a second series of posts covering some of the most pressing issues in supply chain management today. Make sure you receive our blog e-newsletter (sign up to the right) or follow us on social media so that you don’t miss out.
Steve Mondazzi writes about how the Internet of Things is now being used to improve factory workflow, increase material tracking, and optimize distribution to maximize revenues. Everything from turning lights on and off to security systems can be controlled from your smartphone, and that technology is moving to the manufacturing industry. Mondazzi examines Mark Morely’s theory that the IoT will impact the industry in three main ways: pervasive visibility, proactive replenishment, and predictive maintenance. He also explores hurdles to implementation — such middleware and a common protocol for businesses regarding IoT. Read article
Mikayla Cadoret focuses on the barriers to entry in the pet food industry. New brands have three options: manufacture product themselves, choose a co-packer who uses a private label, or choose a co-packer who will manufacture the food to the specifications of the brand. She discusses the challenges of those choices as well as high-profiles recalls resulting from co-packer error. She recommends strategies that companies implement to keep tabs on co-packers’ sourcing and manufacturing. Read article
Nicole Brooks explores Amazon’s mission to be earth’s most consumer-centric company. The e-commerce giant not only offers low prices, it also exceeds consumer expectations and shifts industry standards with benefits like same-day shipping. Brooks examines Amazon’s biggest technological assets, and looks forward to up-and-coming innovations like Kiva robots in warehouses, drones, Prime Air, and Amazon Business. Read article
Corey Ducharme discusses the traditional four-step problem-solving method and how it isn’t effective in solving needle-in-a-haystack issues resulting from limited business resources. Six sigma can address these issue with its six-step process. With the addition of an analysis phase, solutions become more effective, leading to better results and higher revenue for businesses. Read article
David Chadwick explores whether advances in radio-frequency-identification technology (RFID) will render humans obsolete in the supply chain. RFID could dramatically improve efficiency and accuracy in warehouses by reducing the need for human interaction. But it is uncertain to what degree this technology will be implemented in all aspects of supply chain management. Read article
Dario Cavegn discusses how increasing size and complexity of global supply chains open them up to increased risk. Supply chain disruptions can vary from insignificant to extremely threatening. But regardless of disruption size, supply chains can remain resilient with a business continuity plan, which acts as a road map to continue operations during or after a disruption. Cavegn outlines the development process from analysis to feedback. Read article
Josh Hutchins explores the limitations of big data. The real value lies in the analytics applied to the data. As an example, Solid Gold Bomb drove its prospering t-shirt business into the ground from an oversight and misapplication of data. Hutchins concludes that companies must have an intimate understanding of big data applications to avoid a similar fate. Read article
Michael Hickey discusses third-party logistics providers as a resource for a company’s operations arm. 3PLs offer an outsourcing opportunity for order fulfillment, inventory and warehouse management, as well as transportation of finished goods. But businesses should ask themselves these questions when determining whether a 3PL is a good fit for their needs. Read article
Sarah Hebert discusses Chipotle’s high-profile pork-supplier conundrum. The chain cut their pork supply by a third due to a supplier’s violation of their animal welfare standards. While this affected sales by 7-8%, Chipotle embraced the situation as a strategic PR opportunity. But behind the scenes, the company was scrambling to address long-term supply concerns associated with its rapid growth. Hebert asks, “At what point do you scale back the growth for the sake of maintaining brand integrity?” Read article
Connor Harrison discusses GM’s recall of 2.6 million vehicles. The company’s faulty ignition switches were linked to 13 deaths and 31 front-end collisions, but the company managed to contain the crisis. Harrison examines the root causes of the issue, including faulty ignition switches from GM’s supplier Delphi, a strained business relationship, and legal complications. Read article
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by Elizabeth Hines | Mar 21, 2017 | Blog, Diversity, Leadership, Supply Chain, Talent, Transportation & Trucking
The founder and president of Women In Trucking discusses bringing gender diversity to transportation.
Ellen Voie is successfully breaking down barriers and changing the perception of the trucking industry. As founder and president of Women In Trucking (WIT), Voie and her team work to promote the organization’s mission “to encourage the employment of women in the trucking industry, promote their accomplishments, and minimize obstacles faced by women working in the industry.”
Voie has been named a Transportation Innovator Champion of Change by the White House, a Fleet Owner Dozen Outstanding Woman in Trucking, and a Supply & Demand Chain Executive Magazine Pro to Know 2016. Her blog was recently named one of the top three logistics and supply chain blogs in 2017 by Fronetics readers.
I spoke with Voie about her experiences in the transportation industry, as well as her hopes for WIT and the future of women truckers.
Early career
After a semester pursuing broadcast journalism, Voie unexpectedly moved back to her hometown in Wisconsin for family reasons and got a job drafting at a steel fabricating plant. The company soon asked if she had any interest in moving over to their new traffic department. Tempted by the offer that they’d also put her through school for traffic and transportation management, Voie gladly accepted.
Voie was responsible for bringing in all the raw steel and shipping out the finished product for three plants. But, as a young female traffic manager, she noticed that she was a bit of an anomaly. “I remember walking into the traffic fraternity meeting and realizing I was the only woman there,” she says.
While she proved herself extremely competent and capable, Voie still met some resistance. “I was 20 years old, hiring drivers that would tell me, ‘I’ve been working longer than you’ve been alive!’”
But to drivers who struggled with the idea that she would be their boss, Voie simply replied, “If you have a hard time taking instruction from a female, then don’t apply.”
Voie would move on from the plant to work as a freelance transportation consultant, executive director of Trucker Buddy International, and manager of recruiting and retention programs at Schneider National. Her industry knowledge and capability earned her great respect in the industry and beyond.
Women In Trucking is born
Voie’s role at Schneider involved helping the company attract and retain drivers. She was asked to focus on four groups: returning military, Hispanics, seniors, and women. “So I started doing research on what women look for in a carrier,” she recalls. “I began to realize that the trucking industry as a whole did not do a very good job of focusing on bringing more women in.”
At the time she was working on getting her pilot’s license and belonged to a group called Women In Aviation. Voie thought to herself, “Why is there not an organization for women in trucking?”
The idea for WIT was born.
After launching in 2007, Women In Trucking was well received. “Companies thought, ‘Yes we should get more women!’” Voie says. And as the driver shortage became more critical, carriers became even more enthusiastic about hiring women drivers. They began to realize that, generally, women take fewer risks and make really good drivers.
Removing obstacles
One of the pillars of the WIT mission is to minimize the obstacles women face in the industry. When asked about the biggest challenges, Voie is resolute: “The biggest obstacle is image. Women outside the industry just don’t think about driving a truck. We need to show them that it’s not the same old physically demanding job that it used to be.”
One of Voie’s strategies for changing the industry’s image is by educating young girls about trucking. WIT has partnered with Girl Scout groups across the country to develop a transportation patch, for example. And Voie says she’s close to getting a female truck driver doll on toy store shelves.
Equipment is another major obstacle facing women in the industry, so Voie works with truck cab designers on ergonomics and truck cab design. Whether it’s changing the slope of dash and the closeness of the steps or adding more safety equipment and other creature comforts, “they are very interested in learning what it is that women want in a truck,” explains Voie.
Truck stops are similarly invested in making their facilities more amenable to female drivers. “They are always asking: How are the showers? How is safety and security? How are you treated when you go in?” Voie notes.
Voie says that though the percentage of female drivers has held pretty steady (around 7%), increased awareness has helped the industry become more accepting of and accommodating to them through the years. That’s in large part thanks to Women In Trucking providing a voice and advocating for women in the industry.
Leaning in
Another shift Voie has noticed in recent years is that carriers have begun actively recruiting women employees. They’re also celebrating female drivers and executives through events and functions, and building retention programs specifically targeting their female employees. Voie points to one company that created a female driver liaison to handle all calls and concerns from women drivers. Steps like these are helping carriers to attract female talent and support existing employees in a very positive way.
Women within the industry, too, increasingly are supporting each other in their careers through networking events and mentoring relationships. Women In Trucking is helping to build these networks and provide mentoring opportunities. As a result, Voie has witnessed a growing number of women taking on leadership roles in the industry.
Voie also stresses the importance of relying on tools like social media to connect with each other. “The trucking community is very close, and social networking brings them even closer,” she says. “Physically they are away from home and their companies and are alone in a cab, and they really depend on social media to stay connected.”
Through mutual support and active engagement, women and WIT have changed the conversation about females in the trucking industry.
The future of Women In Trucking (and women in trucking)
Looking ahead, Voie is focused on growing WIT’s membership and attracting other verticals, like towing, warehousing, and manufacturing. “There are a lot of people in the industry who aren’t necessarily involved exclusively in trucking, and I’d like to be a resource for them as well,” she says.
She’s also working on developing a best-practices guide based on the successes of companies that have a high percentage of women at both the management and driver level. And she’s very excited about an upcoming partnership with Feeding America, in which carriers will donate delivery of a load to help relieve hunger.
As far as the future of women in trucking, Voie sees only more good things to come. And she offers this advice for women facing naysayers who doubt their abilities or experience: “You have to prove yourself. Don’t be a victim. Don’t denigrate yourself or feel that you can’t do it — because you can. When you prove yourself, you’ll love it.”
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by Elizabeth Hines | Mar 20, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
If you want to connect with your target audience, make storytelling a part of your content strategy.
If you want content marketing to make a big impact on your business, your audience needs to connect with your content. You need to engage them. You need to grab them emotionally and intellectually. You need to get them thinking.
The best content feels like a great story. That’s because stories do all those things and more.
Content that reads like a great story will facilitate engagement and brand loyalty with your audience, which, in turn, will lead to content marketing success. Here are some tips to incorporate storytelling into your content strategy.
Make your brand tangible to your audience.
Statistics and graphics have their time and place. But real people and real experiences are the best way to connect with your audience on a deeper level. Tell real stories — how a customer benefitted from your product, for example — to get your audience to understand what your company can do for them.
When you engage readers and get them involved in your story, you create long-lasting customer relationships. Storytelling makes them form an emotional bond with your company, which drives brand loyalty.
Greg Hadden, executive creative director of Motive Made Studios, sums up the power of this strategy: “What often gets lost is the fact that good storytelling is potent stuff. It has the power to make people want to believe and to belong, which is the goal of all storytellers. We’re all selling something, be it an idea, an exploration of the human condition, or say, a vacuum cleaner. It’s no mistake perhaps that good stories often create products.”
Humanize your content.
Yes, at the end of the day, we’re all selling something. But your content should not be a sales pitch — it should speak to your audience rather than at them. It should connect with them on a human level.
Your content should represent what you do, what your customers stand to gain, and how you are making life better for your customers and those around you. It should convey genuine enthusiasm for your work.
One of the best ways to tap into this enthusiasm is by thinking about what your company stands for and building content around those principles. Is sustainability at the core of your mission? Does your company pride itself on improving customers’ productivity and efficiency? These are messages that can humanize your brand — and that your audience can believe in and relate to.
Whole Foods is an exceptional example of a company using content to connect with its audience and establish itself as a lifestyle brand focused on healthy eating and living. It curates content, for example, about how to save money while still eating healthily. While not directly related to its products, this kind of content understands the needs of the target audience interested in Whole Foods’ products. Further, its content conveys the company’s passion for earth-conscious living and uses proactive language to allow readers to feel like they have an active role in that mission.
Successful content begins with connection. The more you can walk the line between telling a story and promoting your brand, the more connections you’ll make. Start by being yourself and talking about what drives you in your content. The stories you share will be authentic and tangible to the target consumer who is interested in what you have to offer.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Mar 15, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
A supply chain company published one more blog post per week and gained a new customer in one month.
Companies in the logistics and supply chain industries have been hesitant to adopt digital and content marketing because they are unsure about the benefits. We hear it all the time: Who is going to read a blog about my business? How is that going to get me more customers?
Something else we see all the time? How content marketing works for supply chain companies.
You see, the B2B buying process has changed. The vast majority of buyers now go online to research products and services they want to purchase. The proof is in the numbers:
- 94% of buyers reported using online research at some point in the purchasing process.
- 62% of B2B buyers say that a web search was one of the first three resources they use to learn about a solution.
- 95% of B2B buyers are willing to consider vendor-related content as trustworthy.
- 67% more leads were generated by companies with an active blog last year.
- 47% of B2B buyers consume 3-5 pieces of content prior to engaging with a salesperson.
- 51% of B2B buyers rely more on content to research and make B2B purchasing decisions than they did a year ago.
I could go on and on.
Blogging frequency matters
Here’s the rub: Blogging every once and awhile isn’t going to get you results. You need to publish quality content on a consistent basis to attract prospects to your site.
The reality is that the more often you blog, the more traffic and leads you’ll get. Search engines consider posting frequency in their rankings. What’s more, every time you post, you create a new opportunity to be found, to be shared, and to be linked to by other sites.
That being said, you don’t need to post five times a week to be successful. In fact, small steps can go a long way.
Try one more post per week
We often encourage our clients to increase their blogging cadence by just one more post per week. Though some are skeptical of the impact this will have on their traffic and lead-generation efforts, they inevitably find that such a small step can make a big difference.
Take one client of ours, for example.
We suggested moving from publishing one post to two posts per week. The client was unsure this would have any impact, especially for a company in the supply chain industry. But the immediate results spoke for themselves.
After just one month, the client saw the following successes:
- Web traffic increased by 23%.
- Social reach increased by 252%.
- Sales leads doubled. 90% of those leads were sourced from organic search.
- A lead converted to a customer.
All of these results were directly related to the increased blog frequency.
Test it out
The trouble in publishing more posts is balancing resources so that you’re publishing frequently but maintaining value and quality within your content. We’re big advocates of testing to find your personal sweet spot for the amount of posts your organization is able to publish to maximize traffic and leads.
Try publishing one more post per week for one month. Track your KPIs, calculate ROI, and assess whether increasing the blogging frequency is right for your business. You may be surprised at the results.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Mar 14, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Keep these best practices in mind when determining how often to post to social media.
Creating valuable, relevant content in a strategic and consistent manner creates demand for your products and services and drives profitable customer action. But as BuzzFeed’s Jonathan Perelman said, “Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.”
It’s not enough to just create interesting and pertinent content; you have to put it out there to reach your target audience. Moreover, the content needs to be delivered consistently over time, at the right time, and in the right place.
With social media networks changing daily, it’s hard to keep up with where to distribute content, much less how often. Countless studies have attempted to solve the social-media-frequency equation. And while audiences vary across industries, best practices give us some general guidelines.
Here’s our assessment of social media posting frequency.
Twitter: 40 per day*
*Big caveat here: 40 tweets per day is what we’ve found works for us and most of our clients. Let me explain.
Socialbakers suggests that posting to Twitter three times per day is the ideal frequency for brands. Buffer posts to Twitter 14 times per day. Fronetics happens to tweet 40 times per day. So last spring, after seeing the Socialbakers and Buffer stats, we conducted a month-long experiment to see how dropping our posting frequency closer to their benchmarks would affect our engagement.
As we’ve written about before, it wasn’t pretty. We confirmed that our engagement, web traffic, lead generation, and other key performance indicators are at optimal levels when we tweet 40 times per day.
Your company, or your marketing partner, should conduct due diligence and determine what the right frequency is for your business. Yes, you may realize a significant decline in engagement in ROI during your experiment. On the other hand, you may realize an increase in engagement and ROI — captured with lower output in terms of time and resources.
Facebook: 1 per day
Most companies find that posting 1 time per day is their sweet spot for most social media networks. Facebook is no exception: The network’s algorithm values quality over quantity, so the more engaged your followers are with your content, the more likely they are to see your posts. This also means that posting content that does not facilitate engagement can actually decrease the likelihood that followers will see your posts.
One sure way to encourage disengagement is by overwhelming your audience. We all have that friend or company we follow that posts too much — don’t be like that person.
Remember that the lifespan of a Facebook post (about 5 hours) is significantly longer than that of a tweet. So you don’t need to provide a constant stream of content to get your audience’s attention. Your focus should be distributing the most relevant, interesting content you can, at a time when most of your audience will be on Facebook.
Instagram: 1-2 per day
There’s an unwritten rule among Instagramers that a user shouldn’t post more than once per day. We generally agree for the same reason we don’t think brands should post more than once a day to Facebook: Don’t overwhelm your audience because the lifespan of your posts is pretty long. In fact, a Union Metrics study found that many Instagram posts continue to receive engagement for days — even weeks — after posting.
Most brands end up posting 11-20 posts per month. If you focus on compelling images with strategic messages, that’s probably a good benchmark to stick with. It’s important to note, however, that another Union Metrics study suggests posting consistency is more important than frequency. Again, taking the time to test the Instagram posting frequency that works best for your business is a worthwhile endeavor.
LinkedIn: 1 per day
A more formal and technical social media network, consider LinkedIn a platform for business-related content. Don’t post here more than once per day — and consider posting only during the workweek. Many professionals don’t check LinkedIn on the weekends, and your content could easily be missed.
Buffer reports that posting 20 times per month (once a workday) allows companies to reach 60% of their audience. To provide the most value for your LinkedIn followers, content should be less promotional and more heavily focused on industry-wide trends and insights.
At the end of the day, optimal posting frequency for your company rests heavily on the audience you want to reach. Experimenting with different social media networks and posting frequencies will give you greater insight into your ideal distribution approach. With these best practices as a guide, let your own analysis be your guide. Maintaining a dynamic and fluid posting strategy will ensure that your social efforts drive followers to action, rather than drive them away.
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