More of Our Best Supply Chain Cartoons of All-Time

In a Slow Spring Break Week, Let's Enjoy a Little Supply Chain Humor

It's a relatively slow week, as we can tell by the number of "out of office" responses we've received from this week's emails, as many are on Spring break with their families, etc. On top of that, we've been at it pretty hard in these First Thoughts columns since the start of the year, so why not a little supply chain levity this week for a change?

So among all the serious materials we have here at SCDigest, I must say the idea to have a supply chain cartoon caption contest to lighten things up a bit was among our better initiatives.

Gilmore Says.... It's challenging to keep coming up with new ideas, but we'll keep doing it as long as we can. What do you say? Click here to send us your comments

Except it wasn't really my idea. The illustrator who draws our cartoons actually reached out to me, seeing if I would be interested in such an idea. He was doing a caption contest for a web site that focused on industrial automation equipment (PLCs and such), and decided to look around for similar opportunities.

He was actually concepting and illustrating each cartoon for this other publication, but I didn't think that work for us - you have to have the domain knowledge. So I said "We'll concept, you draw" and that's how we got started.

It has been a big hit since its inception. We regularly receive emails from readers saying the cartoon captions bring some laughs that help a bit with the near constant stress that can be part of supply chain.

So this week, once again here are some of the best cartoon/caption combinations we have received. We did this just once before, in 2014, and received some very positive feedback on the effort, so let's give it another go.

I don't think there has been a contest where we didn't have at least one very good submission, usually more, but here are some of the best, all from the past couple of years.

Name and companies of the submitters are obviously what was sent at the time and may have changed since then.

Let's start with one of the winners from the May 27, 2014 contest, with this great caption from Pradeep Bhanot of PINC relative to big data in the supply chain.

Next, we always do a Christmas related cartoon at the end of each year, and for 2014 received this excellent caption from Ron Wheeler of Storck USA.

We received a lot of great captions for this robot related cartoon in early 2015, such that I am publishing two funny submissions, starting with frequent submitter Sue Brittain of Graybar.

Equally good was another caption for this contest from Steven Mihalik of Whirlpool, who also regularly sends in funny captions.

Later in 2015, this Omnichannel-themed cartoon also generated a number of good captions, starting with this winner from Jacques Lamothe of Purolator Inc.

Finally, from early this year we have a funny caption from Alan Fedders of Cincinnati on another ecommerce-related cartoon. Just who might be that enbeatable foe?

So there you have it. Hope you enjoyed these, and had a least a few chuckles. We've had just a handful of cartoons that were close to repeats over these many years of doing this, starting in 2009, but that's it. It's challenging to keep coming up with new ideas, but we'll keep doing it as long as we can.

Do you enjoy the caption cartoon contests? Any ideas for a cartoon? Let us know your thoughts at the Feedback section below.

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