Supply chain technology is getting exciting again

Supply chain solutions are now experiencing a similar step change that CRM and E-commerce solutions went through ten years ago.

That’s the view of retail tech veteran David Hogg. In a LinkedIn post, Hogg, who is currently VP of Business Development at Logistyx Technologies, says: “Over the next five years the big hitters in the industry will battle to become the Salesforce of supply chain....imagine supplychain.com - the single sign-on cloud platform that takes you to planning, TMS, WMS, omnichannel OMS with management dashboards galore - where AI is embedded out of the box.”

“As a natural Scottish pessimist (see rugby and football results) I can say I'm genuinely excited and glad to be involved in the transformation,” he concludes.

Blockchain

Blockchain technology won’t play a major role here in the short-term, if Gartner are to be believed. It was heavily tipped to transform supply chains, but 80% of initiatives in this space will remain at a proof of concept (POC) or pilot stage through to 2022, Gartner claims.

“Modern supply chains are very complex and require digital connectivity and agility across participants,” says Andrew Steven, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner.

“Many organisations believed that blockchain could help navigate this complexity and pushed to create robust use cases for the supply chain. However, most of these use cases were inspired by pilots from the banking and insurance sector and didn’t work well in a supply chain environment.”

This should not discourage companies from experimenting with the technology, however. Blockchain use cases simply require a different approach for supply chain than for other sectors.

Retail pioneers

Walmart, Starbucks and Carrefour have been busy when it comes to supply chain blockchain projects.

The latter is, for instance, applying the technology for tracking milk. Walmart is “leading unparalleled transparency in the food supply chain”, according to the Hyperledger consortium. Whilst Starbucks has implemented Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain Service to track coffee production.