At the end of each year, Schematic Ventures gathers a group of senior supply chain professionals to share their thoughts on the industry's defining trends.
With top executives, entrepreneurs and operators touching every aspect of supply chain, the Schematic Ventures "Predictions from the Pros" is your guidebook to navigating the unpredictable year ahead.
Schematic Portfolio
Roger Counihan – Chief Revenue Officer CognitOps
Supply chains will see even larger eCommerce growth in 2021 - eCommerce will continue to grow its share of retail sales, but retail sales themselves will also grow.
We'll also start to see a generational shift at the senior leadership level of the supply chain - a more diverse, risk taking, and innovative leadership cohort will begin to rise.
Finally, warehouse technologies will be evaluated based on their flexibility to changing patterns - warehouses can no longer be designed to operate in only a single paradigm.
Robert Garrison – CEO Mercado Labs
Digital PLM, Inspection, and Sourcing will largely replace buying trips.
First and final mile will connect to enable DTC from anywhere in the world.
CSR and ESG will go mainstream propelling transparency and resilience solutions that connect all nodes in the 1st mile.
While 2020 was the 1000-year storm that created a surge of freight volatility, and it’s not an environment that one can operate in for a continuous period of time. We see 2021 as a time for shippers to augment their capabilities with additional tools (e.g. 3rd parties, software tools and solutions) to bring manageability to their operations.
Volumes will stay elevated throughout 2021, but in unpredictable, chunky patterns as our economies rebuild and come back online. As a result, capacity will be continue to be extremely tight as the number of transactions in parcel, last-mile and short haul also continue to increase.
Logistics companies will begin an organizational shift to process automation. Several departments such as customer service, operations, and accounting will realize that software bots can read documents, emails, and texts and then migrate that data into systems, reducing the amount of manual keystrokes.
Erik Nieves – CEO Plus One Robotics
If it is true that Covid permanently pulled forward three years of growth in e-comm, then the robots are already late. 2021 will see unprecedented acceleration in the adoption of warehouse automation. Supply chain operators are tapped out on labor and anxious about lockdowns precluding their employees from reporting to work. Automation will be one of their prime risk mitigation strategies.
Anshu Prasad – CEO Leaf Logistics
Logistics is a coordination problem. Coordinating shipments between shippers and logistics service providers drives improved utilization, which cures a lot of the ills were suffering through. We have to stop seeing buying and selling freight as a zero sum, win lose competition, and tackle the coordination challenge at its heart. That's what we're working on at Leaf to dramatically increase coordination opportunities.
Chris Richter – CEO FloorFound
Sustainability in supply chains will be a major point of emphasis. Regulatory oversight will increase, especially around eCommerce shipper behavior. Brands will become more transparent about their practices and provide more visibility/take more credit for their initiatives. New levels of track-and-trace will be required to measure carbon footprint impact and brands - especially apparel and furniture - will continue to push for more eco-friendly materials and audit their readiness for circular commerce.
Overall, there will be broader recognition that consumption patterns being drive by eCommerce growth are not sustainable.
There is no "going back to normal" in 2021. If we do beat back the pandemic this year, it will have scarred our way of operating for several years. E-commerce will continue to grow as a percent of US retail sales. The pandemic introduced tens of millions of Americans to the convenience of e-commerce, and they will not fully return to in person shopping. Our supply chains will adapt to a residential-focused world, and those that are successful will learn to incorporate pandemic and health related adaptations to their operating models. Pandion is here to give retailers and merchants the tools they need to compete effectively in this world
A.K. Schultz – CEO SVT Robotics
More supply chain executives will be welcomed into the C suite, as demand for resilient and flexible supply chain solutions that can be rapidly deployed become the backbone of many P&L statements.
Companies and industries that have avoided automation will feel the strategic imperative to adopt robotics, with supply chain resiliency favored over extreme optimization. This will manifest in capacity, inventory, and sourcing.
Cross-platform integration, visibility, and interoperability will become more important, especially when systems cross business units.
Robotic hardware costs will continue to drop, which along with increased popularity of modular Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) models, will make software optimization the primary means of competitive advantage.
All of the above trends will result in a bias towards multiple, best-in-class point solutions and away from large players with diverse portfolios, and the objectives will be to handle a wider variety of products, reduce lead times, and accurately predict delivery timelines.
In 2021, previously disparate and disconnected supply chain data and analytics will begin to come together. The blurring of compliance, security, logistics, resiliency, and ESG risks across the supply chain will drive enterprises to unify data and analytics across multiple enterprise systems (e.g., ERPs, CRMs, spreadsheets, sales platforms, marketplaces) in order to gain a single source of truth and view of risks across their extended supply chain networks.
Executives & Advisors in Schematic Supply Chain Network
Dan Coll - VP Ecommerce Fulfillment at Kenco Group
2021 will be another year of explosive ecommerce growth. “Brands with purpose” are well positioned to lead that growth with continued hyper-customer adoption. Supporting that growth look for innovative and emerging transportation solutions that solve for fast delivery in the non-marketplace space. Additionally, implementation of supply chain AI, robotics and automation will be critical to solve for labor challenges and increased volume.
Phil Coughlin – Former Chief Strategy Officer Expeditors
The combination of "free form" OCR/ML and RPA will continue to build momentum and will a have long term accretive impact on the productivity and data quality within the supply chain. Converting complex and tedious tasks and workflows into digitized simple workflows.
Jeff Hedges – JHedges Consulting (Former President OPEX Corporation)
In 2021 we are going to see the true marriage between artificial intelligence (AI) and mechanized automation begin to blossom. By that I mean AI as a stand-alone and proven offering that can integrate with autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), robotic picking arms, and other automated point solutions as a plug & play offering.
The grocery micro-fulfillment arena will grow to include retail, offering returns processing and expanding the use of autonomous vehicles for delivery. The continued challenge that the supply chain industry will have in finding and retaining labor will be a key factor in aiding this growth in automation.
Ron Kyslinger – Kyslinger Consulting (Former VP Fulfillment Walmart)
The pandemic caught the eCommerce industry by surprise and left many scrambling to staff their operations as demand peaked during off-peak times. Labor was already difficult to find and the pandemic made it worse as many full-time employees were afraid to come to work as they considered themselves as being in the high-risk category. Even Amazon was forced to waive its 2-day delivery promise for its Prime customers. Failure to respond to the rapid increase in online demand caused many eCommerce players to lose market share.
Greg White – LLA Advisory (Former SVP INNTRA / CCO Ports America)
If 2020 was the year of data, then 2021 will be the year of data science. We will see a meaningful increase in data collection/harvesting from non-traditional sources to enable and drive supply chain innovation through analysis, signal and insight. This will include IoT, sensors, smart cameras, low earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks, and other new advanced technologies including enhanced data processing techniques like machine learning and artificial intelligence. The days of loose/uncaptured data and faltering data collaborations are ending with new collection methods, low cost cloud storage, and the means to share and benefit from insights without exposing protected data. These trends will gain momentum due to commercial upsides, cost saving opportunities, and also ESG considerations. An exciting year ahead!