Embracing a new “normal” for the supply chain
By Harpinder Singh and Natasha Gunther
Regardless of volatile global affairs (whether it be a global pandemic or tenuous trade relationships), consumers and businesses alike have become accustomed to a supply chain that meets their demands and delivers goods efficiently. This places enormous pressure on traditional supply chain structures struggling to meet growing demand.
Innovation Endeavors is working to address these problems (alongside corporate partners) through LINK: an ecosystem of leaders focused on accelerating global supply chain innovation. LINK brings together some of the world’s biggest supply chain players such as Pepsi, Starbucks, Georgia Pacific, USPS, Shopify, and others to improve the supply chain while evaluating the cutting-edge technologies needed to meet the ever-shifting needs of a global supply network.
We recently brought the senior supply chain executives from this ecosystem together for our LINK Supply Chain Ecosystem Day, with this event’s theme being “Embracing the New Normal.” Attendees, including a select group of emerging supply chain startups, discussed the trends and challenges within the industry and heard pitches from leading, early-stage startups tackling problems throughout the supply chain.
One of those attendees was Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Michael Hu. Michael generously agreed to share his perspectives and takeaways from the event with the Innovation Endeavors community. Keep reading to learn more about growing supply chain concerns and possible solutions.
I recently had an opportunity to give a panel presentation at the Innovation Endeavors LINK Supply Chain Ecosystem Day. The panel focused on the future of the global supply chain during a time of continual disruption.
There was a palpable sense of urgency in the room. After all, challenges facing the supply chain today only seem to be growing. But, there was also a feeling of optimism regarding the diverse range of startups bringing game-changing supply chain solutions to life. Most importantly, valuable connections were formed for supply chain innovators and industry titans alike.
The Urgent Need for a New Supply Chain
The world is changing rapidly. For the supply chain industry, the challenges of tomorrow are rapidly approaching, and for many, they have already arrived. LINK members all agreed that our current supply chain process is not equipped to deal with these challenges.
There is a trifecta of forces at play here, including:
- Increasing service requirements driven by E-Commerce.
- A sustained labor market squeeze due to high attrition and ongoing recruiting challenges.
- An ever-accelerating rate of consumer demand volatility makes the supply chain a strategic bottleneck to growth and profit.
Traditional optimization strategies will not solve these problems. Short-term hiring sprees are also no longer a solution for this increased demand and ongoing market volatility.
So how do we fix these growing problems?
Automation is Key
Among the several startups that gave presentations and demos, there is strong evidence that end-to-end supply chain management (E2E) and holistic automation will be a lynchpin for the supply chain of the future. Thankfully incredible progress has been made toward solving high-priority use cases across supply chain operations through automated technology solutions.
A few proposed solutions included:
- Gatik is scaling driverless automation of middle mile delivery (i.e. DC to DC, DC to hubs, DC to stores) across hundreds of lanes for retailers. This will revolutionize omnichannel retailers’ ability to efficiently replenish their shelves and rebalance inventory to win the buy online pick up in store frontier.
- Dextrous Robotics is building AI-powered precision movement robots to handle parcel truck unloading — one of the top three labor-intensive activities across all warehousing and fulfillment today.
- Regrello is creating a No-Code platform for operators to quickly design and deploy applications to simplify and automate supplier coordination. Often, supplier engagement efforts fall short due to IT resourcing challenges. The No-Code revolution will continue to empower operators and democratize IT constraints.
- Torch is building the only digital short-haul 3PL focused on lanes 50–550 miles. They’ve integrated with thousands of micro-carriers to unlock the hidden capacity to move these tricky loads.
- Valdera is unlocking resilient and specialized supplier networks for companies to find the chemicals and raw material inputs they need to build the future of sustainable & branded products.
Collaborative Enterprise Solutions
It takes two to tango.
While startups are coming up with innovative automation solutions, enterprises must quickly step up and drive adoption. This requires the C-suite to better embrace the transformation required to truly embed next-generation automation tech into the core stack of day-to-day operations across processes, decisions, and the underlying data architecture.
If you are a startup or supply chain executive that is passionate about applying cutting-edge technology to some of the oldest and largest challenges in our world today, we encourage you to get in touch with us.
