Historical Accidents and Getting Ahead

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the March-April 2020 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

March-April 2020

Are you ready for NextGen technologies? Just the other day, I had the opportunity to tour one of Amazon’s highly automated robotic fulfillment centers. I expected to be dazzled—and I was. But it wasn’t because of the automation. The tour was a reminder that there’s no question that NextGen technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, robotics, 3D printing and 5G are going to be the differentiators in tomorrow’s supply chain. The question is: Are you ready?

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Most supply chains are historical accidents… really. Think about it: rarely is a business started and launched from a supply chain set of capabilities. Granted, many logistics service companies have instances where supply chain came first, but they’re harder to find.

As supply chain practitioners, we’re always “catching up” to our organization’s latest strategy or sales and marketing initiative. The latest example is omni-channel strategy. In this case, the front end of the sales engine was created as a slick method to digitize the product offering (which, by the way, kept expanding) to offer new ways and options for consumers to shop, order and have their purchase delivered—instantly. The trouble is that supply chain professionals ended up with a new fulfillment demographic and requirements that affected cost and capacity to execute. And, setting up new network nodes and transportation capabilities to satisfy the delivery expectations is not trivial.

For most companies, this is the new normal. New capabilities were developed; partners were brought on board to execute; and new warehouse and transportation management systems were implemented. All of that, of course, after the fact and decidedly in a hurry, essentially creating the historical accident that we now call omni-channel fulfillment.

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