This week I am fresh back from Knoxville and the University of Tennessee’s Spring Supply Chain Forum I have presented at many university supply chain forums in the past, including Penn State (several times), Georgia Tech (several times), MIT, Harvard, University of Wisconsin and maybe one or two others. The basic structures are the same: a group of companies (generally in the 20-40 range) pay a decent size fee to belong to the forum, in return for which they usually receive in part two events per year featuring presentations from practitioners and others. Largely but not totally, the sponsoring companies tend to be either in the general geographic region or have supply chain execs that graduated from a given university. So earlier in the year, Dr. Paul Dittmann (ex of Whirlpool) who runs Tennessee’s Global Supply Chain Institute and assists Dr. Ted Stank with the Forum inquired if I would come down and present on supply chain trends. After the demand for my standard speaking fee was quickly rebuffed, I said Yes anyway, as I was planning on issuing a new set of supply chain megatrends sometime this year as it was. I managed to get the new trends finalized a good 24 hours before my presentation on Wednesday morning, to what was a very large crowd for these type of Forum events (Tennessee does as good a job as anyone at marketing their Forum and especially their research). My presentation seemed to go over very well, with dozens of people complimenting the work afterwards. The new megatrends for 2016 will be released here in this column in coming weeks. It was a quality event, with a number of excellent speakers. I have seen Frank Crespo , VP and chief procurement officer at Caterpillar, speak before, but he keeps […]