The United States Treasury Department has almost completed tests of a blockchain-based grants payment capability as part of the exploration of how the...

Interview with the experts at Chamber of Digital Commerce,  Initially Published by ConsenSys Media: Trends in Tokenization with the EEA and Chamber of Digital Commerce The Chamber of Digital Commerce, the world’s largest trade association representing the blockchain industry, alongside the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a collaborative cross-industry effort created to advance enterprise blockchain technology, recently announced [...]

The post Why Collaboration is Critical Between Policy and Tech Communities appeared first on Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

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This is not a political or even an economic posting relative to the tariffs and the current "tariff war".  Rather, I have been doing a lot of thinking about what this teaches us about supply chain and specifically global supply chain design. 

First, this topic has been talked about for a long time and it goes under the banner of "supply chain disruption".  We have always thought of these disruptions as either "natural disasters" (think hurricanes and earthquakes) or "man-made" disasters such as wars.  In either case the recommendations have been for supply chain professionals to stay very close to the impact of these and how long a company could survive should one hit.  Perhaps this tariff war is a way for us to practice before something we really cannot control occurs.

In 2011 both the hard drive industry and the auto industry were hit hard and interrupted significantly by flooding in Thailand.  Closer in time, the graph below from EPS news shows the types and number of disruptions just in the 2017 / 2018 timeframe:

1. Plan, Plan, Plan - scenario planning and conducting FMEA's are a must in this environment.  You should not have to make it up as you go along when a disruption hits.
   
2. Think about your supply chain as a portfolio.  You likely would not invest your entire life savings in one stock would you?  Why would you do it with your company's supply chain?  Diversity is critical to mitigating risk
   
3. Develop early warning indicators - each with a plan of action if it appears it is happening.  As you develop your FMEA you will likely identify a bunch of interruption scenarios along with probability and severity ratings.  You will then want to work diligently on the scenarios with the highest likelihood with very severe outcomes.  But, it is not good enough to just know them.  You then have to determine what the indicators you will begin to look at to determine if something is going to happen.  How can you monitor the global situation and determine the likelihood of an event?
   
   For example, on tariffs, this was a topic of the election and the US is doing pretty much what it said it would do during the election.  This was a red flag.  While you would never have known for certain what you did know is the "likelihood" of supply chain disruptions due to tariffs increased dramatically on January 20, 2017.  Was it enough to change everything that day?  Probably not.  Was it a good time to pull out your disruption FMEA's off the shelf and update them?  Absolutely.  

Blockchain, typically associated with financial services and volatile cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, is now being touted as the next big thing in disruptive enterprise technology. Simply put, blockchain is a distributed database that exists on multiple computers at the same time. With each new transaction, a block is added with a timestamp and a link […]

The post The building blocks of a better supply chain appeared first on CryptoNewsReview.

While I personally was unable to attend the annual Freightwaves Transparency19 conference this year I did watch a lot of the clips and I was fascinated by the shear volume of "Freight-tech"(I will abbreviate FT) companies coming out of the woodwork to help shippers ship product.  We are in the "golden age" of FT launches, venture capital money and potentially IPOs.

Or, as the title stated, has Uber and Lyft killed the dream?  More on that later but first, let's remind ourselves "how business works".

An entrepreneur comes up with a great idea and tries to get it to scale with a series of private fundings.  Venture capitalists get in early, generally get seats on the board and hope for an eventual big pay day when the company is either sold or goes public.  The company is built to scale (meaning it is generating cash - hopefully - or has a path to be cash flow positive.  Then, the early owners need to take money out of the company for a variety of reasons by going public or selling. Here are the reasons they may want to extract money:

1. Family wealth planning - they generally have a lot of their wealth in the company and they need some back.  
2. Pay Employees - Many early stage company employees are paid with options and they eventually want and need that money.  This is a warning to many employees who get in too late in the game.  If your options are valued right before the IPO then a lot of the time you are under water when it goes public (as are many Uber and Lyft employees).
3. All the juice is squeezed and the VC people want out. - Venture capitalists do not hold companies and eventually they want their money back.  Once they believe they have "squeezed all the juice out of they idea they will want to exit. 

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