Get ready for the NextGen Supply Chain

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the January-February 2018 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

January-February 2018

If you frequent supply chain conferences, as I do, you’ve probably noticed that some of the best-attended sessions are the ones that focus on emerging technologies—or what we’re calling the NextGen Supply Chain. You may have noticed something else: While topics like Big Data, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, blockchain and robotics play to standing room audiences, there’s a lot of confusion about what to do with the information. At the 2016 APICS conference, one member of the audience asked a direct question at the end of an excellent session on Big Data by Hannah Kain, the CEO of Alom: “This sounds great. But there’s not a…

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If you frequent supply chain conferences, as I do, you’ve probably noticed that some of the best-attended sessions are the ones that focus on emerging technologies—or what we’re calling the NextGen Supply Chain.

You may have noticed something else: While topics like Big Data, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, blockchain and robotics play to standing room audiences, there’s a lot of confusion about what to do with the information. At the 2016 APICS conference, one member of the audience asked a direct question at the end of an excellent session on Big Data by Hannah Kain, the CEO of Alom: “This sounds great. But there’s not a single individual in our operation who knows anything about this. Where do I start?”

Where do I start? It’s a question we’ve been thinking about a lot. To that end, we launched the NextGen Supply Chain newsletter in August. Once a month, we’re posting six brief articles about one of the emerging next generation technologies and sending it out as a newsletter. If you’re interested in the topic, I’d urge you to sign up for our newsletters. Just click on the “subscribe” drop down menu on the top right-hand side of the home page, choose newsletters, and go from there.

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