More autonomous, greener, more complex, faster and more flexible: Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA have investigated how Supply Chain Management will change by the year 2040 as part of a study conducted jointly with corporate consultancy Ginkgo Management Consulting.
The self-driving mother vehicle has found its way into the residential area and parks centrally. Drones unload it before delivering the packages. By 2040, this scenario may well have been part of everyday life for some time. Just as feasible is that by then, there could be a special pipeline system via which the “last mile” to the recipient can be covered for mailings. Such future scenarios arise from the necessity to get to grips with rising online orders and increased delivery traffic.
A research team headed up by Martina Schiffer from the Department of Factory Planning and Production Management at Fraunhofer IPA together with Georg Pietrzak and his colleagues from Ginkgo Management Consulting have investigated how Supply Chain Management (SCM) is set to change by the year 2040 as part of a study. In addition to urbanization and digitization, they have identified a further eight megatrends that will impact value chains over the coming two decades.
Personalized products, demographic change, globalization, the growing demand from environmentally friendly and fair trade products, changes in mobility, concerns in connection with data security, the expanding service sector and the transition to a knowledge-based culture and information society: All of these global developments are set to play a role in ensuring that by 2040 SCM will
For their study, the research group headed up by Schiffer and the consultants at Ginkgo Management Consulting surveyed a total of 164 people across the entire value chain online – with a clear focus on manufacturers that do not sell their own products themselves. They then enriched the insights gained from this step in ten expert interviews with top-level managers and experts from leading companies and research institutes. This provided the research group with a basis from which they derived their visions of the supply chains of the future.
The study »SCM2040 – How will logistics change in the future?« is available to download from today free of charge.
www.ipa.fraunhofer.de/de/Publikationen/studien/supply_chain_management_2040_en.html
Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA