100 Fun Facts About Supply Chain

Which American trucking magnate invented the modern intermodal shipping container?

He started with a single used truck in 1935 hauling empty tobacco barrels in North Carolina.

In April 1956 the converted tanker Ideal-X carried the first containers from Newark to which port?

It carried 58 35-foot 'trailer vans' along with its regular liquid cargo.

McLean's container line, originally Pan-Atlantic Steamship, was renamed what in 1960?

In 1967 the US government invited it to run container service to South Vietnam, which produced 40% of its revenue.

Which engineer designed the twistlock and corner castings that lock shipping containers together?

McLean met him at Brown Trailers and hired him as vice-president of engineering and research.

Container ship capacity is measured in TEU. What does the T stand for?

A forty-foot box counts as two TEU, and 40-footers make up about 90% of container shipping.

A standard 20 ft box is actually a little short of 20 feet. Why?

Twistlocks on a ship leave a 3-inch gap between two 20-footers so a 40-footer fits precisely on top.

Roughly what share of the world's non-bulk cargo travels by container ship?

Some 50,000 container ships do the work, the largest carrying more than 24,000 TEU.

In March 2021 the container ship Ever Given blocked which waterway for six days?

Egypt then impounded the ship while demanding a reported $916 million, including $300 million for 'loss of reputation'.

The Ever Given is operated by which Taiwanese shipping company?

The ship itself is owned by a Japanese leasing firm and registered in Panama.

How long is the Ever Given?

That makes it one of the longest ships in service, with a beam of nearly 59 metres.

The canal at Suez officially opened in which year?

French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps had formed the Compagnie de Suez in 1858 to build it.

Which Egyptian leader nationalised the canal at Suez in July 1956, triggering an international crisis?

Until then a mostly British- and French-owned company had operated it.

The locks of the Panama Canal lift ships 26 metres up to which artificial body of water?

The lake sits 26 metres above sea level; the French had tried and failed to dig a sea-level canal.

Which country took over the Panama Canal project from France in 1904 and opened it in 1914?

Full Panamanian control did not arrive until noon on 31 December 1999.

Which two engineers developed the Toyota Production System between 1948 and 1975?

It was originally called 'just-in-time production' and became the model for lean manufacturing.

In the Toyota Production System, what is 'muda'?

Muri is overburden and mura is inconsistency; overproduction is considered the largest waste of all.

The kanban scheduling system takes its name from the Japanese word for what?

Toyota borrowed the idea from studying how supermarkets restock shelves only as customers take goods.

The 'two bin system', ancestor of kanban, was first developed in UK factories building which aircraft?

An empty box is the simplest possible replenishment signal.

Who coined the term 'lean' production in a 1988 article?

Womack and Jones later popularised it in The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking.

The bullwhip effect describes what happening as you move upstream in a supply chain?

A 5% change in point-of-sale demand can be read as a 40% swing by the time it reaches manufacturers.

The bullwhip effect is also called the Forrester effect. Which 1961 Forrester book first described it?

Stanford researchers later popularised the term with a story about Volvo overproducing green cars.

The 'beer game', a classroom simulation of supply chain coordination, was invented at which university?

Jay Forrester created it at the Sloan School in 1960; players run a four-stage chain over 24 rounds.

The first item ever scanned with a UPC barcode at a checkout, in June 1974, was what?

It happened at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, and rang up 67 cents.

How many digits does a standard UPC-A barcode encode?

The related European EAN code has 13, and both are assigned by the GS1 organisation.

What are the dimensions of the standard North American GMA pallet?

It was standardised by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and typically weighs 37 pounds.

Approximately how many wooden pallets did the US produce in 2025?

Pallet loss is a real industry headache, with millions going missing every year.

Incoterms, the standard trade terms like FOB and CIF, are published by which body?

The first edition came out in 1936, and Incoterms 2020 defines 11 rules.

How many rules does Incoterms 2020 define?

Seven of them can be used with any mode of transport and four are for sea and inland waterway only.

A bill of lading is a document issued by whom?

It acknowledges receipt of cargo and, unlike an invoice or insurance policy, is negotiable.

The founder of FedEx first outlined the company's concept where?

His professor reportedly did not think much of the idea for a network built around urgent deliveries.

FedEx's main air hub is in Memphis. Where is rival UPS's largest air hub?

Both companies chose southern US hubs for overnight sorting.

In the film Cast Away, which real FedEx executive appears as himself?

FedEx lent facilities, planes and uniforms, and a team of its marketers oversaw two years of filming.

The shipping giant Maersk was founded in 1904 in which country?

Its seven-pointed star logo dates back to the original Svendborg steamship company.

In 2010 which port overtook Singapore as the world's busiest container port?

It handled 29.05 million TEU that year and 43.3 million by 2019.

Who is credited with coining the term 'supply chain management' in 1982?

He was a Booz Allen Hamilton consultant speaking to the Financial Times.

'Supply chain' may have first appeared in print in 1905, about a British expedition to where?

The Independent worried about 'keeping a supply chain with India unbroken'.

The word 'logistics' entered English from French, coined or popularised by which Swiss military writer?

He defined it in his Summary of the Art of War, and one contemporary guessed it derived from 'logis', lodgings.

In which year did Ford W. Harris develop the economic order quantity model?

His article was titled 'How many parts to make at once', a question warehouses still ask.

Which research firm is credited with first using the acronym ERP in the 1990s?

The same firm declared 'ERP Is Dead—Long Live ERP II' in 2000.

Which retailer began cross-docking, moving goods straight from inbound to outbound trucks, in the late 1980s?

The US trucking industry pioneered the practice in the 1930s and the military adopted it in the 1950s.

The name 'Silk Road' was popularised in 1877 by which German geographer?

He made seven expeditions to China between 1868 and 1872; the network itself dates to the Han dynasty.

The first true ancestor of modern RFID, a passive transponder with memory, was patented in 1973 by whom?

He demonstrated it in 1971 to the New York Port Authority as a toll device.

Before containerization, goods handled manually piece by piece were known as what kind of cargo?

Every sack and crate was lifted separately, which is why ships spent far longer in port than at sea.

What inspired Taiichi Ohno's idea of restocking only what had been consumed?

Ohno saw that shelves were refilled after items sold, not in anticipation of demand, and applied the same pull logic to Toyota's lines.

By the time of which war were most US military supplies shipped in steel CONEX containers?

The first big CONEX shipment went by rail and sea from Georgia to Korea in late 1952; the boxes stacked three high and kept out the weather.

A landmark 1980 conference that sped Western adoption of JIT was held at whose headquarters?

It was co-sponsored by APICS's Repetitive Manufacturing Group; by the mid-1980s HP, Motorola, GE and Apple had all adopted JIT practices.

In which year was the first standalone railcar for carrying containers two high delivered in the US?

The five-unit well car that became the industry standard followed in 1981, after trucking and rail deregulation.

To McLean's frustration, Sea-Land's container of what length was left out of the ISO standard sizes?

Rival Matson ran a fleet of 24-foot boxes; the standards emerged from compromises among shipping lines, railroads and truckers.

Which Japanese ship was the first container vessel built to ISO standards, from 1968?

NYK's ship carried 752 TEU; by 2025 the largest container ships carried more than 24,000.

Which early Western JIT adopter documented mid-1980s results across four of its divisions?

The firm later became a textbook example of a collaborative supply network in which each partner focuses on a few key activities.

In 2012 Amazon paid $775 million for which warehouse-robot maker?

It was Amazon's second-largest acquisition at the time; the orange robots now go by the name Amazon Robotics.

Mick Mountz built his warehouse robots after watching which online grocer fail?

Mountz blamed inflexible material-handling systems and the high cost of filling each order, so he designed robots that bring the shelf to the picker.

What do the letters in DHL stand for?

Adrian Dalsey, Larry Hillblom and Robert Lynn started out in San Francisco in 1969 flying shipping documents to Honolulu.

UPS's signature brown was chosen to match which vehicles?

Founder James Casey wanted yellow, but partner Charlie Soderstrom argued it would be impossible to keep clean.

Which US company began developing powered lift trucks in its own factories in 1917?

Clark was a transmission maker; Towmotor entered the lift-truck market in 1919 and hoist-maker Yale & Towne in 1920.

In 1992 a container spill put 28,800 of what into the Pacific, to oceanographers' delight?

The yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles and green frogs were tracked for years by Curtis Ebbesmeyer to map ocean currents.

What was the US codename for the 1948–49 Berlin Airlift?

Day one saw 32 C-47s haul 80 tons of milk, flour and medicine; by the end the Allies had flown in more than 2.3 million tons, mostly coal.

The WWII Red Ball Express truck convoys ran for 83 days until which port was opened?

At its peak the Express, staffed mostly by African-American soldiers, ran 5,958 vehicles carrying about 12,500 tons a day.

The Mulberry A harbour off Omaha Beach was abandoned in June 1944 after what?

Mulberry B at Gold Beach kept going for ten months, landing over two million men and four million tons of supplies.

In WWII's Operation Pluto, what did PLUTO stand for?

Fuel lines under the Channel were meant to spare vulnerable coastal tankers; the first 'Bambi' line from the Isle of Wight delivered only 3,300 tons.

Mumbai's dabbawala lunchbox delivery network traces back to which year?

Mahadeo Havaji Bachche started with about a hundred men; the system still skips the metro because its cabins can't hold hundreds of tiffins.

In January 2022 which company overtook Maersk as the world's largest container line?

Captain Gianluigi Aponte started it in Naples in 1970 with a single ship named Patricia, and his family still owns it outright.

Rotterdam lost its title as the world's busiest port in 2004 to which rival?

Rotterdam had held the crown since 1962 and remains the largest seaport outside Asia.

The 98 km Kiel Canal lets ships bypass which peninsula?

The shortcut between the North Sea and the Baltic saves about 460 km, and around 32,000 ships a year take it.

Roughly what share of the world's traded goods passes through the Strait of Malacca?

More than 94,000 vessels a year squeeze between Malaysia and Sumatra, carrying oil, coal, palm oil and Chinese manufactured goods.

Seawise Giant, the longest self-propelled ship ever built, was what kind of vessel?

Its length was only surpassed in 2013 by Shell's Prelude floating gas plant, a 488-metre barge that cannot move under its own power.

The load line painted on ships' hulls is named after which British reformer?

His 1873 book Our Seamen shamed Parliament into the Merchant Shipping Act 1876, the first law to define the mark.

QR codes were invented in 1994 by Denso Wave to keep track of what?

Masahiro Hara's team borrowed the look of black and white Go stones; one label replaced a row of barcodes on each box.

Barcode co-inventor Norman Woodland sketched his first design where?

He stretched Morse code dots and dashes into lines, and the 1952 patent covered both linear and bullseye designs.

Which 1984 novel teaches the Theory of Constraints through plant manager Alex Rogo?

Eliyahu Goldratt's mentor figure Jonah, a physicist, is widely read as a stand-in for the author himself.

Drone company Zipline began delivering blood to rural clinics in 2016 in which country?

The first distribution centre was at Muhanga; a second opened in 2018 as deliveries expanded to vaccines and medicines.

The Antonov An-225, the heaviest aircraft ever built, was designed to carry what?

The only one completed was destroyed in the battle for Antonov Airport during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Jones Act, which restricts shipping between US ports, is a section of which law?

Senator Wesley Jones of Washington introduced it; section 27 covers cabotage, the coastwise trade.

Which container ship brought down Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge in March 2024?

The ship lost power on its way out of port; when the bridge opened in 1977 the biggest box ships held 3,000 TEU, and Dali carried 10,000.

The 2011 Thailand floods caused a year-long global shortage of which product?

Thailand made about a quarter of the world's drives; prices nearly doubled and Western Digital's profits more than doubled with them.

A 1997 fire at supplier Aisin cut off 99% of Toyota's supply of which component?

Forecasts said weeks of lost output, but rivals and suppliers improvised production and Toyota was back in five days.

The world's longest artificial waterway links Beijing with which southern Chinese city?

The Grand Canal's main stem runs about 1,776 km and grew in importance once Kublai Khan moved the capital north.

On the 40,000 km Inca road network, what were the chasquis?

Relay stations sat a short run apart, while tambos a day's walk apart fed travellers and their llama flocks, all without the wheel.

Which emperor created the cursus publicus, Rome's state courier and transport service?

Its reach is mapped on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a road map of the empire from around AD 400.

In 1882 the ship Dunedin took the first full cargo of frozen meat to Britain from where?

The voyage founded New Zealand's meat export industry; the clipper had been refitted with a Bell-Coleman refrigeration machine.

IKEA went flat-pack in 1956 after Gillis Lundgren struggled to fit what into his car?

Lundgren later designed the Billy bookcase, of which more than 140 million have been made.

What does ZIP stand for in the US ZIP Code?

The five-digit codes arrived on 1 July 1963; postal inspector Robert Moon had proposed them back in 1944.

The Pony Express cut coast-to-coast message time to about ten days, but lasted how long?

It went bankrupt despite a heavy subsidy once the transcontinental telegraph opened in October 1861.

Joseph Orlicky's MRP system was first implemented in 1964 at which company?

By 1975, the year Orlicky's book came out, 700 companies were running MRP; Oliver Wight later extended it into MRP II.

Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 while visiting which country?

The 'Silk Road Economic Belt' speech was at Nazarbayev University in Astana; the maritime half was announced in Indonesia a month later.

Which port handles the most containers in the United States?

Combined with neighbouring Long Beach it ranks about tenth in the world, in a bay that began as a mudflat too soft for a wharf.

Which port handles roughly half of Britain's containerised trade?

An early start on container handling turned a once-insignificant Suffolk port into the UK's largest by 1980.

The first container crane was built in 1959 at Alameda, California, for which line?

PACECO built it at Alameda's Encinal Terminal, and the design became the template for the gantry cranes at every box port today.

Toyota's error-prevention term poka-yoke replaced an earlier name meaning what?

Shigeo Shingo formalised the term in the 1960s; a classic example is a parts tray that reveals a forgotten spring.

In the lean method SMED, the 'single minute' means a changeover should take how long?

Toyota's die changes once took two to eight hours; by the 1990s some were down to 180 seconds.

Why did US shipowners first start registering ships in Panama in the 1920s?

Owners then noticed the lighter regulation and cheaper labour and stayed; by 1968 Liberia had the world's largest register.

Six Sigma was introduced in 1986 by engineer Bill Smith at which company?

By 2005 Motorola credited the programme with over $17 billion in savings; GE later made it famous.

At its 16th-century peak, how fast could the Venetian Arsenal turn out a galley?

Some 16,000 workers assembled standardised parts on a production line that Dante name-checked in the Inferno.

In 1987 Walmart finished a $24 million network linking all its stores via what?

It was then the largest private network of its kind, letting head office watch inventory and sales and beam video to stores.

Why was the Boeing 747's cockpit placed on a raised upper deck?

Boeing expected supersonic jets to take over passenger flying and the 747 to live on as a freighter.

Why does Alibaba's Singles' Day shopping festival fall on 11 November?

'Bare stick' is internet slang for a bachelor; Daniel Zhang turned the campus joke into a 24-hour sale in 2009.

Since late 2023, attacks by which group have pushed shipping away from the Red Sea?

The Yemeni movement declared any Israel-linked ship a target but also hit vessels with no connection, forcing lines onto longer routes.

Around a quarter of the world's seaborne oil trade passes through which strait?

A fifth of the world's liquefied natural gas goes the same way, most of it bound for Japan, India, South Korea and China.

Emma Maersk, the largest container ship when launched in 2006, was named after whom?

Built at Odense, she carried about 11,000 TEU officially and up to 14,770 by another count.

Nicolas Appert claimed a 12,000-franc prize offered by the French army for what?

He had first sealed food in champagne bottles; the 1810 payment came on condition that he publish his method.