LM Viewpoint: Putting technology to work in new ways

In his session during Logistics Management’s Virtual Summit in December, MIT’s Yossi Sheffi stated that whatever may come from the pandemic era, one sure bet was that it would act as “a great accelerator for supply chain technology trends that were already in motion.”

His forecast is coming to fruition.

Starting on page 20, contributing editor Bridget McCrea kicks off our 2021 Technology Issue by catching up with Sheffi and six other top supply chain technology analysts to see just how far logistics professionals have progressed on their digital transformation journey over the past year.

Back in December, Sheffi suggested that due to the new, sequestered working environment, real-time data analytics and communications platforms that facilitate telecommuting and provide increased visibility into supply chain operations would be the first to accelerate.

“That was certainly the case,” says McCrea. “Seemingly overnight, shippers were grappling with an entirely new set of challenges, and companies using antiquated visibility and forecasting tools like spreadsheets had a tough time keeping up with the huge uptick in e-commerce orders as well as managing remote workforces, supply interruptions and new customer demands. It was either implement visibility software and modern communications processes—or shut down.”

Gartner’s Bart De Muynck takes it a step further. He says that while the disruption has accelerated the interest in creating digital business models, we now need to continue the investment and fully execute on digital—and only then will we recover and be prepared for the future.

The discussion on technology acceleration continues in this year’s Technology Roundtable. Starting on page 30, our 2021 panel takes a look at the technology tools that are alleviating some of the pressure from our strained freight networks and warehouse and DC operations triggered by the growth of e-commerce.

“As a percentage of total retail sales, e-commerce has been taking about 1 to 1.5 percentage points a year away from brick-and-mortar sales pretty steadily for the last five years,” says roundtable panelist Ian Hobkirk. “In 2020, e-commerce market share grew by 4% in the second quarter alone. That means that when the pandemic first hit, we saw the equivalent of more than three years of natural e-commerce growth in just a month or two.”

And that reality created challenges never seen before across every part of operations. With that in mind, our roundtable panel dives deeper into the evolution of advanced transportation management systems, the benefits of supply chain network design technology, the rise of goods-to-person systems and robotics—and offers suggestions for optimizing e-commerce automation and delivery systems.

“The old adage was ‘necessity is the mother of invention,’ but in our times we’re solving the new challenges by simply putting existing technology to work in new ways,” says roundtable panelist Bill Brooks. “There hasn’t been anything like it in our lifetime.