The supply chain skills gap is a real crisis. There are literally millions of open manufacturing jobs, and this number is only going to escalate as more Boomers retire. The good news is that more and more organizations are beginning to tap into a vast, highly skilled talent pool: women.

For this week’s issue, I’ve invited Jennifer Proctor, APICS director of publications, to write a piece derived from the first APICS Women in Supply Chain Forum, held earlier this year at APICS 2017.

Business and bicycling: It’s not often that those two things are mentioned together. However, this week, Quartz ran a story advising businesses to learn from British Cycling and how it seized an opportunity to get more women involved in the sport.

Many women in supply chain have expressed to me the unique challenges they face in the profession. Their situations are not unlike those that female engineers encounter, which were described in a Fortune Insider commentary by Erin Brooks.

The most telling lines from this week’s article come at the very end: “If we want to finally make real progress on promoting more women, after decades of talking about it, men, women, and organizations all need to step up and take decisive action to make it happen,” writes Rebecca Shambaugh in the May 25 issue of Harvard Business Review.

In March 2013, I picked up a study conducted by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute (MI) titled “Untapped Resource: How manufacturers can attract, retain, and advance talented women.”