Is Your Supply Chain Ready For Alexa?

Winning brands will rebuild their supply chains for three hugely disruptive technologies — voice, artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles

- Abhijit Prabhu And Adam Borchert

Autonomous trucks already speed down Nevada’s highways, and drones now deliver packages in China’s most remote villages. Once considered the outer reaches of science fiction, these and other futuristic advances are happening faster than most people expected, bringing with them critical decisions for consumer products companies.

Over the past decade, consumer products executives thoughtfully reinvented their supply chains to emphasise long, mass runs in standardised manufacturing facilities, aiming to lower costs and prices. Now, those same business leaders face the challenge of overhauling their supply chains again, this time for a world being transformed by massive technology disruptions, as well as by the rising retailer demands and consumer expectations those technologies have created.

In a recent Bain & Company survey of 51 consumer products executives, we learned that 88 per cent expect their supply chain and operations activities to feel the impact of digital technologies in the next five years, up from 66 per cent just last year. Unfortunately, relatively few consumer products executives are getting out ahead of the changes they will need to make to their supply chains, in everything from manufacturing to packaging to logistics.