In this context, Amazon, the global e-commerce giant, has changed and continues to overturn all paradigms by managing a worldwide supply chain with very competitive shipping and delivery times. Just think that today, each of us expects to receive the purchased goods immediately and with no shipping costs. And this has raised the level of service expected in all sectors, making the supply chain a fundamental lever for the customer’s customer experience.
Even in sectors such as telecommunications where logistics processes were not considered critical, the supply chain is becoming one of the corporate priorities to maximize customer satisfaction while reducing overall costs. As a result, an ad hoc function has been created in many companies that manages the entire process in a unitary way end to end. And the supply chain manager is quickly climbing the corporate hierarchies and in many companies he is at the first level of reporting by the CEO. For example, in FCA the last reorganization, before the agreement with PSA, led to the integration between purchases and supply chain in a single corporate function whose manager also becomes part of the Group Executive Council (GEC), the highest operating body of FCA.
But today we are only at the beginning of the evolution of the supply chain. In the future, the most significant challenge will be that of sustainability with the need to redefine the life cycle of products. This means that the managers will have to design a “circular life cycle” for the company’s products, in which all (or almost) the components of the product and packaging will be recycled, that is, recovered and reused. This will create value for the customer and for the company. At the same time, technology will play a fundamental role in the design and operational management of the supply chain of the future.
In particular, artificial intelligence, which today is used only in a few companies to predict the demand of the different customer segments, will instead be used systematically to automate the decisions of daily operations, forecasting orders and reducing costs. Other technologies on which we will create a competitive advantage will be those relating to Augmented and Virtual Reality (augmented and virtual reality) to optimize the monitoring of the shelves in the store and minimizing the risks of exhaustion.
To date, these seem to be the most promising technologies for the impacts they will have on logistics processes, however we are confident that new platforms and new tools will emerge that will still upset the world of the supply chain. The only certainty is the continuous change of the boundaries and tools of the function. Consequently, people within the supply chain will have to be more specialized and have broader skills at the same time. This will increase the complexity of the challenge, but will make the supply chain one of the central functions of companies in all sectors.