Age Of Disruption

We have entered into an age of disruption in the market and this disruption is fueled by the consumer embrace of technology and especially the explosion of wireless technology. The technology has allowed consumers to reshape their interactions with retail to support their lifestyles and the velocity of this change has been increasing past the point of market disruption. The market partners must realize now and accept this as the new reality. The velocity and volume of change will not slow and will continue to disrupt the market for a long time. This disruption, though, can be addressed through a robust continuous improvement program, or more appropriately, a continuous disruption program. It is more critical than ever to implement a strong process that can sense the direction of change, or disruption, and also identify the most flexible and robust method to address the disruption.




As change velocity and magnitude increases the market disruption also increases to the point of reaching a continuous disruption model that remakes the market on a regular basis. The tensions of this model have been building for a while now and it seems that the technology advances and especially the wireless technology advances have provided the foundation to deliver the disruption that as been in the wings of the market. Market participants can no longer wait for the change to settle an then implement the new standard because the new standard is changing at a breakneck pace. This continuous disruption will require that market participants increase their rate of change to meet the demands or they will be left behind on the periphery if they are lucky. You can clearly see the results of the disruption in the retail marketplace by the increase in the number of bankruptcies.




This requires the market participants to step up their game, especially in the ways that they are collaborating and developing partnerships to meet the demands. The supply chain is leading this integration and partnership drive and has been developing the tools for a while now. The extended supply chain has developed a strong model for implementing the type of network that will allow the entire marketplace to sense and respond to the demands and even help to create the disruptions in the marketplace. The supply chain extended network supports speedy and efficient integration of new partners and encourages specialized service providers to bring new point solutions to support the supply chain demands.




The way to succeed in the age of disruption is not through harder work but through AI technologies to sense change and then a strong collaborative network to react to the change. No single organization can hope to bring the resources and the flexibility of capabilities to address the disruption (maybe Amazon, but that’s another story). This is where the flexibility and capabilities of the extended supply chain network can be viewed as a model for future direction.