Logistics discipline is not a modern science.
It was mentioned in ancient times during the war between Sparta and Athens.
In our modern globalized world however, everything is quickly changing, including Supply Chain Logistics & Distribution.
In this context, companies need to continuously redesign their platform and infrastructure to satisfy new business requirements. It particularly it happens with Supply Chain Logistics & Distribution management as it is the backbone of the overall transformation. Being innovative every day is a must.
It was very touching that during the press conference that announced Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia, Nokia’s CEO ended his speech with the words
“We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”
Upon saying that, all his management team, himself included, teared up.
Nokia has been a respectable company. They didn’t do anything wrong in their business, however, the world changed too fast. Their opponents were too powerful.
They missed out on learning, they missed out on changing, and thus they lost the opportunity at hand to make it big. Not only did they miss the opportunity to earn big money, they were losing their chance of survival. But they learned the lesson, and Nokia rebirthed reintroducing classic 3310.
The message of this story is, if you don’t change, you shall be removed from the competition.
It’s not wrong if you don’t want to learn new things. However, if your thoughts and mindset cannot catch up with time, you will be eliminated.
In conclusion:
The advantage you had yesterday will be replaced by the trends of tomorrow. You don’t have to do anything wrong, as long your competitors catch the wave and do it right, you will lose out and fail.
To change and improve yourself is giving yourself a second chance. To be forced by others to change is like being discarded. Those who refuse to learn & improve, will one day become redundant and not relevant to the industry. They will learn the lesson in a hard and expensive way.
Today’s changes are strongly impacting how Supply Chain Logistics & Distribution management is working.
In the following pages, we will provide a perspective of what is changing in Supply Chain Logistics & Distribution in the Digital Era with the objective to stimulate newest approaches to incoming changes.
