10 Trends for the Next 10 Years

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the July-August 2013 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

July-August 2013

How do you extend the frontiers of supply management excellence and build a solid competitive advantage? Answers to this pivotal question emerged from an Executive Summit of supply chain leaders convened recently at Michigan State University. The four companies profiled here, all participants in that summit, have adopted principles that promote excellence and continue to expand that frontier.

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Recently, I happened to be perusing the aisle of a bookstore (there are still a few of them left) and found a book by Pavan Sukhdev titled Corporation 2020. The title was intriguing and the contents were illuminating. Basically, the author argued for a new formula for business success going forward—one that looked at all aspects of doing business and emphasized the corporation’s responsibility to society and to sustainability.

The forward-looking nature of Sukhdev’s book set the wheels in motion for this article. Quite a bit has been written over the years about the future of supply chains. MIT’s SCM 2020 project, for example, bought together leading thinkers and practitioners to address the subject. However, this research and most of the articles I have read on the topic have focused on supply chain operations and not so much on the points of “intersection”—that is, the related activities that are outside of the supply chain’s direct control such as R&D, information technology, and post-sales service. In my list of the top trends, I have incorporated a number of these intersection points.

As we think about the major trends that will affect the next generation of supply chains, we need to consider certain macroeconomic factors. Prominent among these is the changing global economic demographics. Walk into any multinational consumer goods or manufacturing company today and you’re sure to hear a lot of discussion about the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) markets. The GDP growth in those countries far exceeds the growth in more fully developed economies. Further, the sheer number of consumers in these countries already accounts for about 40 percent of the world’s population. And by 2050, their combined economies are expected to eclipse that of the world’s richest countries—including the U.S. and European Union.

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