From The Road: Council of Logistics Management Annual Conference
Written by Kurt Menges, chief editor, Supply Chain Market and Logistics Online
Over the past six months, I have spoken with hundreds of logistics professionals. When I asked these industry experts which professional associations they participate in the resounding answer was the Council of Logistics Management. "CLM's annual conference reflects the council's dedication to providing significant educational experiences that help members further their professional success," says Susan Rider, customer development leader, RedPrairie.
As a chief editor, I have attended my fair share of conferences, symposiums, workshops, and tradeshows over the past 20 years, and I would place CLM in a league of its own (light on pomposity and heavy on technical content). Tom Mentzer, Ph.D., from the University of Tennessee, Department of Marketing, Logistics and Transportation says that, "CLM is always the premier educational event of the year where attendees can learn more about logistics from industry colleagues in a couple days than they can learn the rest of the year combined."
The conference began Monday morning, September 22nd with 225 educational sessions (spanning 28 learning tracks) being conducted over two and a half days. As the saying goes "you had to be there" to fully appreciate the breadth and depth of the presentations. For me, this proved to be both a blessing and a curse as I found it very difficult to choose seven sessions from several dozen that piqued my interest.
To satisfy our appetites for more information on the sessions we missed, CLM is compiling conference proceedings that are available to both conference attendees and CLM members. These 28 tracks contained 225 total sessions and focused on the following topics:
- Benchmarking and Performance Metrics
- Business Issues
- Closed Loop Supply Chains and Reverse Logistics
- Collaboration
- Critical Transportation Debates
- Current Research and Surveys
- Customer Issues
- Demand Management in the Supply Chain
- Global Logistics
- Implementing Supply Chain Management
- Innovation and Adoption of Cross Industry Practices
- Lean Supply Chains
- Linking People, Process and Technology
- Logistics Frontiers
- Logistics Software
- Material Handling--Fulfilling Logistics Strategies
- Multi-modal Logistics
- Outsourcing
- Procurement, Sourcing, and Supply Side Management
- Professional Development
- Regulations and Legal Issues
- Supply Chain Finance
- Supply Chain Fundamentals
- Supply Chain Optimization
- Supply Chain Security
- Transatlantic Logistics
- Warehousing
- World Logistics: Underpinning the Business Revolution