This week’s letter includes a good summary discussion from two conferences on “Maximizing last mile deliveries”. Second is an excellent podcast from Bob Bowman on the future of Lean, JIT, supply chains, resilience, and the transformation to digital in light of the pandemic.

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​Maximizing Last Mile Deliveries, Logistics Viewpoint, August 26 (6 minute read) The article summarizes discussions from two recent conferences.

First, the ways to maximize partnerships to optimize final mile deliveries into 3 components (from Reuters Events Retail Supply Chain Virtual USA conference) looked at;

• The needs of the customer to build a suitable network footprint for efficient fulfillment and the changing role for retail stores.
• The evolving collaboration into unique capabilities to create a flexible and agile network of multimodal transport providers within cities to match increasing demands from e-commerce in ways that dated practices can’t.
• Use data technology to enhance accuracy to improve automation potential in last mile processes for better route optimization and customer experience management.

Second, looked at home delivery best practices (from Descartes Evolution virtual conference). These were categorized into 4 areas;

• Dynamic Delivery Appointment Scheduling generates dynamic appointment options during the sale.
• Same Day Optimization enables time-definite same-day appointment scheduling based on real-time fleet status
• Contactless Delivery solution provides proof of delivery information using picture capture and GPS coordinates
• Omni-Channel Home Delivery is delivery promising across multiple delivery modes including private fleets, DC/stores, white glove agents, parcel and local couriers, commercial LTLs, the gig economy (crowdsourced deliveries), and click and collect from stores.

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​Podcast | Should We Scrap Just-in-Time Supply Chains? Roy Anderson, Tradeshift CPO and Bob Bowman, SupplyChainBrain (15 minutes listen at 1.5x)

Cost-cutting with Lean and JIT has dominated supply-chain management strategies for years. The focus is shifting towards resilience and the paths that each company will travel to get to there. Key take-aways are:

• Lean, JIT will remain but are being balanced with a renewed focus on resilience
• Lean is more important than ever for removing duplication, errors, and should be coupled with digitizing to minimize human mistakes.
• Resilience should be valued as a competitive advantage
• No one solution will emerge. It will take a mix of approaches to achieve flexibility
• Digitizing supply chains from beginning will be a survival imperative
  • 70% of all invoices are still paper, email, and pdf which non transparent, slow, and inflexible
  • The biggest road block to transforming has been people’s job security
• A.I. enables processing of massive amounts of supplier data which makes decisions faster and facilitates holistic cost management.
• Suppliers are your innovation engine. Squeezing them at every opportunity is not a good practice.