It was again a very interesting year in supply chain for 2015 – but aren’t they all these days? This week, I will summarize what I feel are the most important key themes and trends of the supply chain year that was. Next week in our OnTarget newsletter, we’ll publish our popular timeline of key events over the past year. Later next week, I will be back for a review of the year in numbers and graphs. You might also be interested in our list of the top Green supply chain stories of 2015, some of which will make it into our overall top stories, and my blog take on the 2015 Christmas season in supply chain. So let’s get right to it, starting with the really big picture. As always, the state of the economy was key to how we managed our supply chains, and once again in the US we saw sluggish growth, with what is likely again to be full year real GDP growth in the 2% range, in fact maybe a little under that. Once again, as with 2013, Q1 began weakly, up just 0.6%, followed by solid growth of 3.9% in Q2 and then 2.1% in Q3, with Q4 looking like it will be on the low side – and worrisome economic news clearly all round. That bad news of course includes stock markets tanking this week on a global basis, and the US Purchasing Managers Index, which measures the state of US manufacturing, falling below the critical 50 mark that separates expansion for contraction in both November and December, after 35 months of manufacturing growth. Euro and Japanese economies as usual were even weaker than in the US, and globally deflation remains a real worry. A major factor was the continued slowdown in […]