While more women are embarking on supply chain careers, there is still a pay disparity between men and women. Recent APICS research, which was highlighted this week in the Wall Street Journal, shows men in supply chain on average earn 16 percent more than women.

Ford F-150s are the United States’ best-selling vehicle and a serious financial boon for the carmaker. According to The Detroit Free Press, F-Series trucks contribute more than $100 million a day to Ford revenue.

Harvard Business Review posits that the advancement that will drive the factories of the future is not automation but, instead, operations enhancements.

Although professionals often excel at their own job responsibilities, many only have a vague idea of what their colleagues’ jobs entail. As supply chains become more intricate and entwined, it’s helpful for supply chain professionals to understand the responsibilities and pressures their business counterparts face every day.

Blockchain has been touted as the cure-all for everything from financial fraud to voting, but this week Wired magazine’s Maryn McKenna suggested that blockchain could help prevent E. coli. How? Consider that two weeks ago, the earliest signs of an outbreak of the disease surfaced in New Jersey.

I recently had the opportunity to write a brief response to The Financial Times about what a supply chain transformation entails. The response accompanied a large feature on the status of seafood conglomerate Thai Union, which faced a crisis in 2015.

British supermarket chain Iceland is making a bold sustainability move. The retailer is becoming the first major UK supermarket chain to stop using palm oil in its store-brand food products. It aims to accomplish this goal by the end of 2018, The Guardian reports.

Since 2012, The Manufacturing Institute has celebrated women in manufacturing with its STEP (Science, Technology, Engineering and Production) Ahead Awards, which recognize women in manufacturing who exemplify leadership within their companies.

With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, supply chain professionals are expected to embrace many new technologies — from artificial intelligence and robotics to predictive analytics and cloud computing.

U.S. leaders are levying new tariffs on Chinese imports and tightening restrictions on Chinese investments in U.S. technology, The Wall Street Journal reports. The efforts are an attempt to limit intellectual property theft and adjust a trade imbalance with China.

In just a few years, digital assistants have become common place in homes, with adults and kids asking alarm-clock-sized devices about the weather, their favorite songs and much more. This week, IBM announced its own take on the trend with Watson Assistant.

Two Harvard Business Review contributors have pointed out that there is not yet a well-accepted definition of what industries fit into the supply chain economy. Along the same lines, there also is not a formal count of the number of jobs supply chain encompasses or a rating of those jobs.

Supply chain professionals know that in the medical industry, supply chain performance is critical to the health and wellness of individuals. This week, Wired’s Maryn McKenna uncovered the effects a “long, thin” supply chain has on the medical industry.

Last week, even the Colonel couldn’t help KFC restaurants in the United Kingdom. Approximately 800 of the 900 KFCs in the U.K. temporarily closed because of a chicken shortage, according to CNN Money.

While retailers are still celebrating one of the strongest holiday buying seasons in recent years, the secondary retail market is now enjoying its own successful season. Once consumers take their unwanted items back to retailers, resellers and reverse logistics groups acquire those items to turn their own profits.

As my kids have gotten older, I have started worrying less about what they are packing for lunch, and more generally about how they are living (or will soon live) on their own.

Supply chain professionals know that the answers to many questions lie in the data. Of course, the first step is to collect the data needed for analyses. A recent article in GreenBiz highlights how large-appliance manufacturer Whirlpool implemented a data collection and management initiative that ultimately helped the company.

In movies, on television shows and even in the news, robots sometimes are portrayed as the enemy of the worker because they threaten to take away people’s jobs. In the auto industry, however, this is proving to be untrue, as large manufacturers opt to balance the work of both humans and robots on their assembly lines.

After blockchain technology has proved its use in a variety of fields and industries, the digital ledger has officially secured its place in the financial markets. Two exchange-traded funds (ETFs) focused on blockchain technology launched last week to help investors take advantage of the digital platform’s popularity and growth.

UI Lab’s Digital Manufacturing Design & Innovation Institute helps small and large manufacturers with innovation and manufacturing excellence.

India grew its automotive industry to the 6th largest in the world through manufacturing strategy and investments by Ford, Toyota, Honda and others.

Apple’s exemplary supply chain is a model in the tech industry. But when it released the iPhone X shortly before the 2017 holiday buying season, its logistics functions became paramount. According to a recent Forbes article, Apple exerted great effort to ensure estimated delivery dates were met or exceeded.

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.

Brands such as Michael Kors, Polo, Kate Spade and others want to “win” Christmas. Bloomberg’s Stephanie Hoi-Nga Wong wrote about how they might do that in “Christmas Becomes Inventory War Game for U.S. Fashion Brands.”

Japan is dealing with another scandal tarnishing its reputation for quality. Toray Industries announced last week that one of its subsidiaries had faked quality data on its textiles. The Wall Street Journal reports that Toray joins Nissan Motor Co. and Kobe Steel in their quality scandal woes.