Just my (re-) imagination

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the March-April 2016 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

March-April 2016

When I visit my millennial-aged daughter in Chicago, I’m amazed at the number of packages dropped off by UPS, FedEx and the USPS at her three-unit building on a daily basis. It’s as if she and her neighbors are single-handedly keeping Amazon in business. All those drop-offs got me to wondering: Does any of this make sense if you think about a carbon footprint? Rather than deliver millions of packages to one address at a time every day, wouldn’t it be more sustainable if we all just drove to the mall to do our shopping? After all, doesn’t research indicate that a signi cant percentage of consumers, especially millennial consumers like my…

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Change is powerful. But, the pain associated with change is one reason companies often move slowly to embrace new ways of doing business. There are times, however, when change is so sweeping it can’t be ignored: In his book, “The Third Wave,” Alvin Toffler wrote about three societal waves of change. The first was the settled agricultural wave, the second was the industrial wave, and the third was the post-industrial wave, or as he also called it “the information age.” We believe we are entering into a fourth wave of change, a “connected wave” that is based on the evolution of the information age into a digital age as exemplified by this quote:

“The 20th century was about dozens of markets of millions of consumers. The 21st century is about millions of markets of dozens of consumers,”
­­—Joe Kraus, Google Ventures, BBC News Magazine

The digitization of markets is transforming the competitive landscape across industries to omni-channel marketing, sales and fulfillment. E-commerce is becoming “connected commerce,” with everything from consumer goods to building materials to specialty chemicals being marketed, bought, and sold on line by customers who are “connected” to markets and suppliers. Competition can come from anyone, anywhere and anytime. Companies find themselves simultaneously as competitors, customers, partners, and suppliers with one another. The digital technologies that are driving this wave of transformation are:
• the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices
(including GPS);
• the Cloud and pervasive computing;
• Big Data and analytics (business intelligence); and
• social media.

Going digital
What does it mean to go digital? Companies must understand and leverage these digital technologies to compete in the digital markets of the 21st century. They must analyze the unique characteristics of their customers and prospective customers to develop personalized, segmented market and channel strategies. The proliferation of different market segment service requirements, products, and demand are driving new supply fulfillment and network design requirements.

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