Future-Proofing Supply Chains
Due to the rapidly changing environment and the changing customer behaviour, companies will have to rethink the way they deliver their products and services. Most companies are still operating a supply chain that was designed in times of cheap oil, before
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Abstract Due to the rapidly changing environment and the changing customer behaviour, companies will have to rethink the way they deliver their products and services. Most companies are still operating a supply chain that was designed in times of cheap oil, before any trace of e-commerce. These supply chains now run up against their limits and they will definitely not stand the upcoming challenges of tomorrow, the biggest of which are probably societal and environmental. Twenty challenges are identified and their impact on supply chains is described. In order to be successful in a rapidly changing environment, companies have a strong interest to make their supply chains future-proof at all times. A future-proofing diagnosis is developed to assess the supply chain of a company and to evaluate the gap with the upcoming societal, consumer and logistics challenges. Companies who are futureproofing their supply chain will identify and seize much faster the supply chain opportunities to create a competitive advantage.
1 Introduction Supply chains are operating in a rapidly changing global environment. Not only societal changes, but also changes in the way consumers behave, have or might have a direct impact on logistics. Consequently, the logistics environment is changing and will continue to change accordingly. This has a direct impact on supply chains of companies. If a company’s supply chain cost and carbon footprint is increasing, while service level is continuously decreasing because of increased inventories, longer waiting times, badly aligned production processes, decreasing service levels, etc. . . then this could be interpreted as a sign that the current supply chain strategy might not be adequate anymore to the environment it is operating in.
A. Van Breedam is CEO of TRI-VIZOR NV (www.trivizor.com) and Parttime faculty at the Antwerp Management School and the Catholic University of Leuven. A. Van Breedam (*) Antwerp Management School, Sint-Jacobsmarkt 9-13, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 M. Lu, J. De Bock (eds.), Sustainable Logistics and Supply Chains, Contributions to Management Science, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-17419-8_3
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At first, it is important to try to understand how the environment in which supply chains operate is currently changing and how it will evolve in the future. Based on the expected changes and future challenges, a company needs to deploy a strong, but adapted supply chain strategy. Fundamental to a strong supply chain strategy is integration. The strength of a supply chain heavily depends on the internal integration among the subsequent supply chain departments procurement, production and distribution on the one hand and on the external integration with suppliers and customers on the other hand. Information availability, preferably as real-time as possible, and communication, i.e. the so-called supply chain visibility, is mandatory to pursue a strong integration. Today, a lot of companies
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