View on Emerging Technologies: The Physical Internet, a shared logistics model

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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BOOM! Did you know that every time you send an email, you cause an explosion? Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone. Many people don’t realize it, but that’s the way the internet works.

At some point today, you probably sent an email. The moment you hit “send,” your email was broken into numerous packets. Those packets were then routed all over the world separately, probably to diverse interim locations and were ultimately routed to their destination where they were reassembled so that the message could be read by your recipient.

This process is called Transmission Control Protocol/Internet protocol, or “TCP/IP” for short. It really doesn’t matter that you’re using one internet provider, and the recipient is using another. Nor does it matter that you sent the email through Microsoft Outlook, and they’re reading it in Apple iMail. The delivery mechanism and network are agnostic.

If you think about it practically, as the sender, you don’t really care that this process has occurred. You just want the intended recipient to receive the email as quickly as possible, and in one piece. Nor does the recipient really care how it got to them; they just want to ensure they don’t miss an important message.

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