Why is Supply Chain still low Tech?

"We've been firefighting for years."

I learned the value and the power of #technology in the #supplychain, #logistics and #transportation at #Amazon way back from when Amazon started to ship products other than just books and CDs to them creating their own transportation and delivery network.

In addition to that, I learned to look at technology first (not only) whenever there was a new challenge.

Talking a lot to supply chain execs recently I asked why the adoption of new technology in many supply chain related businesses seemed to be so slow and behind other industries.

The common denominator of the answers was both; ‘as expected’ and ‘surprising’ at the same time.

“We’ve been firefighting for years – there was no time to implement anything new!”

For sure, starting in 2020, the pandemic offered significant challenges for supply chains globally and the effects lasted even into 2022.

Then, in 2022, the war in Ukraine started and this totally changed supply chains, especially in Europe.

Latest with the start of the Suez crisis in 2023, when shipping lines had to go “the long way” it was clear that geopolitics had become a significant factor in modern supply chains.

Now we have a trade war and that will, or already is, “hit” supply chains again.

These events haven't created new supply chain challenges; they've simply highlighted and intensified existing issues. 

So, the term “firefighting” doesn’t really describe what is going on.

Firefighting is for one fire (i.e. issue or crisis), you put the fire out and then you back to normal and that is exactly what will NOT happen for supply chains.

The next crisis will come for sure and not addressing the vulnerabilities with the help of new technology to increase visibility, increase flexibility and build resilience will – well – just “pour oil in the fire”.

Time to make time to implement something new, or not?