Access has launched two new white papers looking into how converging trends are shaping the future of logistics and strategic supply chain developments.
‘Step into the future of logistics’ examines how current trends are changing logistics. E-commerce has significant implications for warehouse and fulfilment systems. Social media has undermined demand, and therefore production, forecasting and dramatically shortened product life cycles. Competition is now based on service levels, and in particular the speed and accuracy of execution of fulfilment.
This is driving change in warehouse location, space requirements for new activities and technology. For warehouse systems, the new environment has suddenly become much more complex.
The second white paper: ‘Step into the future of supply chain’, takes in the implications of trends such as near sourcing manufacturing, Corporate Social Responsibility, the ‘Internet of Things’ and a move to value delivery systems with organisations using social media to better manage forecasting, inventory and service as well as provide greater supply chain transparency.
Ian Roper, director of Access, said: “Supply chains will need all the flexibility and adaptability they can muster to cope with emerging trends, with implications both for physical operations and the systems that support them.”
He added: “Future warehouse systems will be an autonomous part of a much wider supply chain ‘meta-system’. Through seamless integration with these systems, a warehousing system will ‘know’ everything. While we can’t know the future of innovation, it is good practice to make logistics as device independent as possible.”
