Discontinuous Demands Of The Market

Consumers are driving waves of discontinuous demands that are disrupting the market and all of the partners in the market. The cycles and the velocity of changing demands has increased as a result of the consumer embrace of technologies that allow the consumer to shape their demands based on their changing lifestyle requirements. Just as the market reacts to a set of demands it seems that the consumers shift and change the demands again. This cycle is complicated by the combinations of generational, technology and lifestyle priorities. The market must implement the process and tools to sense and respond to the demands in a manner that allows them to maintain the pace of the discontinuous demands.

Millennials and Gen X’ers are entering and as a result of their entrance are impacting the market in a big way as a result of their comfort with technology and their imagination in supporting and even creating their lifestyle demands. These millennial and Gen X’er generations are the ‘tip of the spear’ in utilizing technology to create new ways to meet their demands. They are also a significant reason for the decline of department stores, large retailers and brick and mortar stores that is especially demonstrated in reductions in mall and store traffic.

The largest impact though is from the baby boomers embrace of technology and capabilities. This generation is a quick learner and perhaps most importantly from a market impact perspective they are also quick to embrace new trends and capabilities. Technology provides the opportunity to explore and rebuild a market and a very large number of baby boomers are searching for ways to support their lifestyle demands. In addition, baby boomers are not afraid of technology and as a result are quick adaptors to new technologies and capabilities that can address their demands.

Technology is the great equalizer in the market from both the consumer and the partners supplying the consumer. The combination of generations and their propensity to new demands and quick adaptation of new capabilities has dramatically shortened the change cycles. This, in turn, has left the market struggling to maintain and react. This cycle and resulting impact is quickening and bringing with it a faster disruption to the market that must be addressed in order to survive.

The change cycle has reached the point now where there is really no time for the market to adjust and extend the new capabilities across partners. The cycle has reached the point where the market must react quickly or fall behind. Falling behind can be the beginning of the end though because of the difficulty in catching up with the market.

This is where the importance of the collaborative social network practices come into play for the market to allow the partners to collaborate in reaction to meet the market demands. In other words, a strong collaborative network allows the partners to react and adjust to changing demands more efficiently and quickly. This is where the social networking technologies and practices make a big impact on the market reaction.

Social network technologies combined with big data and artificial intelligence analytics provide the capabilities to sense change in market demands more efficiently and earlier to allow for reaction time by the partners. Collaborative practices and tools allow partners to react in a manner that does not require each partner to develop a reaction to the demand. Instead the collaborative practices allow partners to take advantage of the specialties of each partner in reaction to the changing demands. The strength of the collaborative network allows market reaction to demands at the speed of the changing demands.

The greatest difficulty though is overcoming cultural practices that historically have viewed the changes in meeting demands as a trade secret to create a competitive demand. The culture needs to change to increase sharing and collaboration to sense and react to the changing demands. The competitive advantage is in the sharing and collaboration to allow the partner to more quickly react to the demands.

The measures especially utilizing collaborative practices to respond to the changing market demands are not overwhelming. These collaborative practices have been utilized for years in the extended supply chain as a means to react and respond to changing demands. The difficult actions from the market reaction perspective have been related to cultural practices both in the market and in the responses to the market demands. This has shown that overcoming cultural challenges in market leadership will be the number one challenge and delays or continuing in the same cultural practices will only cause the continual decline for these current leaders in the market.

Artificial Intelligence - The Common Strategic Thread

All networks, social, business, integration and collaboration, news and extended supply chain networks are all related through a common thread, data and more specifically - how is the data used to drive decisions and execution strategies? The glue then that combines the data in a manner that can be used to sense and respond to the waves of disruption in the market.

I believe that the constant running through all aspects of the market place is the discontinuous disruption that is driven by consumer embrace of technology combined with the market reactions to the consumer demands. Marketplace partners must recognize this new reality and work to incorporate methods to obtain the data necessary to feed the decision making process. The value and the accuracy is based upon the amount and types of data that are incorporated and available to the process. This precept itself drives the need and the value of collaborative analysis and data collection across the partners.

This model is especially important to the retail marketplace where the market is continuously buffeted by changing demands from consumers that are themselves driven by changing technical capabilities. These reactions and impact from technology has been a fact of life for quite some time within the extended supply chain and the pressure of reaction to disruption combined with the demands of cost containment and reductions are driving collaborative partnerships in the extended supply chain. These partnerships along with the resulting data collaboration can be used as a model for the marketplace as a whole. This is a key reason for the importance placed on the supply chain by Amazon and others would benefit greatly by embracing this practice.

In addition to the importance of collaborative data, the marketplace partners must also take into account the level of accuracy changes that occur during the life cycle of the analysis. The accuracy of the decision goes through a measurable life cycle:

• Infancy starts with sensing the potential reactions to the demands. This is an unclear time where many options can be taken in reaction to the data and the analysis. This is the beginning of experimentation to test the options.
• Mid-term or decision childhood where the options are narrowed based on additional data analysis based on the results of experimentation from the infancy stage. This is the refinement of decisions and strategy based on the results of experimentation. This is marked by refinement and addition of experiments to support analysis refinement.
• Maturity or decision adulthood where the strategy is fully formed and executed based on the refinement resulting from the data analysis. This is also where the next disrupting concept begins to form and requires the continued analysis of results from the strategy to form the new concept and strategy.
• End of life of old age where the positive results of the strategy decline and the consumer and market are driving the new disruption. This is end of the strategy value and it is equally important to be able to sense the decline of the strategy as it is to identify the beginnings of a new disrupting factor.

You can see that the process I described above follows the PDCA, continuous improvement process, which is a standard practice of the supply chain. This provides a solid framework to sense and respond to the disrupting factors and has been incorporated across a wide range of marketplace practices. The disrupting factor that drives improvements to this process is the collaborative data collection and analysis that allows the process to sense potential changes earlier and then through AI analysis provides the guidance for experimentation and validation to formulate the change to react to the disruption.

Social Networks Driving Supply Chain Disruption

Social network collaborative technologies have left a mark on the personal communications world in the way that the technologies encourage both immediate connections and in the communications capabilities between connections. You can see the impact across all areas of interaction and these tools and the new collaborative capabilities they enable have disrupted not only personal social interaction but also the retail marketplace and the extended supply chain network. The disruption in the supply chain network can be seen in all aspects of the supply chain that thrive on collaboration and interaction, in other words these capabilities have disrupted the supply chain network practices. The resulting waves of discontinuous disruption will continue to be felt across the supply chain network for a long time to come.

Social network technologies and the resulting collaboration technologies are founded on open and efficient communications through networks and across technology platforms. The extended supply chain and partners processes and procedures require open and efficient communications through networks and across technology platforms so this has been a match made in heaven. This embrace of technologies was simply waiting for the right moment of technology and extensions of network technologies and frankly imagination to rise and disrupt the supply chain.

The pieces and practices have been in place in the supply chain for a long time and really waiting for someone with the imagination and will to define and deliver the potential. The tools for communication between have been available through EDI technologies, for instance. These technologies have been enhanced though to support extended connectivity demands via improvements in network and wireless technologies. The Internet of Things (IoT) has played a key role in the disruption of the communication. These technologies continue to disrupt process and practices as capabilities are developed to support the demands.

The areas of focus and disruption change based on reactions to demands and imagination in delivery and capabilities. The LTL market, for instance is in the throws of a major disruption now based on shared ride technologies. This has flowed into freight forwarders and also customization demands to support inventory management for last mile deliveries. This is a great example of consumer demands driving the market to incorporate social technologies, in this case ride share technologies, into the business process to improve the practices. Another example of technologies and network capabilities impact on supply chain is the Iot tools and capabilities utilization to improve tracking and planning capabilities that has been a continuous improvement process for quite some time.

Blockchain tracking and tracing capabilities are incorporated to support demands of lot trace and date management for food products to provide historic product pedigree information accuracy. These capabilities were initially slow to acceptance and now the combination of market demands (read consumer demands), regulatory requirements to support recalls and improvements in technology and network capabilities are driving this to mainstream usage. Blockchain technologies already provide a great deal of benefits and while already delivered significant impact in the supply chain it is really still in its infancy and I expect the capabilities and usage to expand with new imaginative demand.

Retail disruption has combined with technologies to produce a discontinuous disruption in supply chain to support changing consumer demands. Disruptive forces have always been around and the big difference now is the speed of the disruption. This speed has been increased as a result of technology and network capabilities available to the consumer more than any other factor, the key factor to the discontinuous disruption is the embrace of technology by consumers. The technology, combined with the improvements and growth in networks allowed the consumer to drive change into the market. Then social networks and social network technology encouraged the spread of consumer and business use of the technology. Putting technology into the hands of consumers is driving the rate and size of disruptions.

The challenge for the market and the supply chain is the identification of important and key disruptions, in other words what disruption will have legs that allow the disruption to grow and expand in usage. Unfortunately, there is really no way to determine the winners and losers and so the supply chain must act on all. This is where social networks and collaboration really show their value. Social networks provide the means to sense the disruption and measure the speed of growth along with clarification of the disruption. Collaboration and collaborative development allow the supply chain to respond and react to the disruption.