“If we do nothing, carbon emissions from urban delivery traffic will increase by 32% as recently as 2030.”

“Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a strong emergence of  another element: How green, how sustainable are the fulfillment methods that the company that is selling something to me are adopting?”

"There’s been this perception over the last 4-5 years that if suppliers can get their product to customers quickly, that’s the most convenient thing in consumers’minds. It’s not. Convenience to consumers means that they can receive their order on the most agreeable terms to them."

“Just because a lot of people select a certain delivery speed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that this is what they really wanted. It might be the thing that they dislike the least. This can give the impression of huge popularity, but the most popular thing might not even be available.”

“By 2025, quality management needs to be defined by four characteristics: predictive, connected, flexible and embedded. These are the four critical shifts we must make to be successful in the future.”

“To keep up with the expectations and help companies get high-quality products out of the door faster, the value of quality management will shift from solving known problems to predicting problems before they occur.”

“Quality can no longer just focus on the product, but has to take into account the product’s interaction with the ecosystem. Basically, quality can no longer be internally focused, as an expanded ecosystem exposes the organization to new risks.”

 “In the future, quality governance will evolve to a flexible, open-source governance model, optimized for speed and customization, keeping only critical parts of decision-making while giving control to the end user.”

“To align with the new needs of business and new ways of working, we can no longer rely on subject matter experts to own all quality tasks. Instead, quality will be democratized, relying on a broad set of employees to apply quality management skills as needed. ”

"Technology will identify when a decision must be made, and it  will help us to screen the decisions. It will also help us to track the quality of decisions."

“Technology will allow us to use more data, to become more automated - even autonomous when the situation allows - and leverage our human intelligence for decisions that cannot just flow through automatically.”

“We will have fewer static cycles (quarterly, monthly, etc.) and move to a position where decisions can be made whenever, wherever they are needed: moving towards continuous decision making.”

“Supply chain planners will have to work differently. They will need to learn much more on how they can model the supply chain: the setups, the constraints, the dependencies; how they can model the business priorities: which customer is more important? Which products are more important?”

“This will also affect skills: the organizational setup will need to have even more network-oriented end-to-end (E2E) planners with a very good understanding of technologies and how they work.”

“At the moment, the control of the logistics industry very much sits in the carrier or service provider area.”

“What logistics leaders are expected to do is to ensure that the technology they deploy to run their logistics function is indeed fit for purpose.”

“Cost optimization can no longer simply come from negotiating a rate reduction. Cost reduction has to come from the removal of waste -removing redundant processes, looking to automate more of the manual processes that have traditionally been undertaken by a lot of logistics functions.”

“We are facing a labor crisis in the logistics industry, and as much as technology can replace some of that labor,  it’s not going to replace the human element altogether from the logistics industry.”

“What we see emerging is the concept of supply chain as a service and how some 3PLs are trying to take the lead in developing that concept and incorporating all of the extended supply chain functions into one outsourcing value proposition.”