Autonomous drones delivering packages, perhaps trundling along pavements or flying through the air. Shipment-level real-time GPS-based track-and-trace technology, perhaps augmented with environmental condition monitoring. Intelligent storage bins, capable of intelligently making decisions about reordering, sequencing, and traceability. Or swarms of autonomous AGV-like shuttles, capable of deciding for themselves what must be done to meet a given set of tasks at a warehouse picking face or materials replenishment facility.

Now throw in technologies such as blockchain, predictive modelling, advanced planning and scheduling, vast online marketplaces driving trillions of dollars-worth of trade each year, guided buying, the Internet of Things, robotic picking faces and materials handling equipment, and chatbots.
Welcome to the future – and more specifically, the future of supply chains and the technologies underpinning supply chain management, for taken together, all of these are different manifestations of the same thing: aspects of supply chains that have been digitally enhanced to bring about capabilities once considered almost unimaginable.

Is it actually the future, though? Undeniably, in one very real sense, no, it is not, because all these things currently exist, are in use and can be seen working – most of them in real, live supply chains. Amazon, notably, is driving a huge amount of innovation in these very areas. Sceptics scoffed when the company spent $775 million in 2012 acquiring robotics company Kiva Systems. They laughed a lot less by the time the e-commerce giant purchased autonomous warehouse robotics company Canvass Technology in 2019.

Yet all too often, as I relate in paper for The Supply Chain Academy: Digitalized Supply Chains: Building the Future One Step at a Time, such examples are more properly just standalone instances of information technology at work. Put another way, they are waypoints along an information flow journey that goes back not years or decades, but centuries, ever since supply chains began to stretch across oceans and continents.

In short, today’s cutting-edge technologies are islands of excellence: initiatives where information technology has been harnessed to improve one particular aspect of a supply chain, just as in their time sailing ships, the telegraph, MRP, EDI and other innovations all accelerated information flow across sections of supply chains. However, as we supply chain professionals know full well, the real goal is something else, something much bigger and bolder, namely, true end-to-end digitised supply chains, where information technology is used to enhance not one particular part of a supply chain, but the entire supply chain.

How do we get there? Why are we not there already, or at least, closer to the destination than many real-world supply chains appear to be? What are the barriers? How do we overcome them and what skills are necessary to do this? Just as importantly, what skills are necessary in order to manage end-to-end digitised supply chains?

Such questions are easy to ask, but more difficult to answer. To discover some of those answers, I spoke with a selection of highly regarded supply chain insiders close to the issues, including fellow academics, supply chain practitioners, consultants and software experts. Together, we explored the journey towards end-to-end digitisation, the strategic benefits of engaging in that journey, and skills required to undertake it.

If it is a journey that is of interest to you or your organisation, download a copy of the paper here.

Omera Khan FCILT
Professor of Supply Chain Management, Royal Holloway, University of London; Executive Strategy Advisor, Supply Chain Academy