January 8, 2019

2019 Predictions for the Supply Chain

Five Current Trends That are the Basis for This Year's Predictions

My first prediction is based on five big trends we are seeing.  

• More students are coming out of school with R or python programming experience.
   
• Executives starting to realize that they can’t just buy off-the-shelf AI apps—they need to build tailored AI to suit their needs and strategy.  
  
  
• Vendors are providing platforms instead of off-the-shelf tools.  
  
  
• Algorithms are getting easier to write-- lots of open source software has these algorithms built already, as an example.
  
  
• There is more data to feed the algorithms-- both internal and external data.
  
  

Watson Says... ...we just won’t be talking about blockchain as a completely transformational technology in the supply chain anytime soon. What do you say? Click here to send us your comments

These five trends lead us to predict that 2019 will see a big rise in the development of custom supply chain apps.

My second prediction will find a lot of doubters and may generate some hate mail: I predict that in 2019 the hype will drain out of the use of Blockchain in the supply chain.

I can see the value of Blockchain in Bitcoin where trust is a huge issue. As I see it, two big reasons that blockchain was so transformational for Bitcoin is because the minors have a big financial incentive to verify transactions (and this allows the ledger to be clean and permanent) and that the assets are widely spread so that it becomes difficult to mount a 51% attack (where a group gains 51% of the “votes” and can then manipulate the short term ledger).

When it comes to the supply chain, I find it hard to believe that any outside entity has the right incentives to verify that a supplier shipped 20 cases of tomatoes to your local grocery store. So, we will still need the buyer and seller needing to go back and change the ledger to correct the cases of tomatoes shipped. And, in supply chain applications, almost by definition, a group should have more than 51% of control (Amazon, Walmart). 

So, it is hard to believe that the ledger will be permanent and unchangeable (like it is in Bitcoin).

Going even further, I don’t see that trust is the big issue in most supply chains.  That is, Walmart already trusts that its vendors will ship pretty much what they order and have systems for checking this.  And, the vendors trust that Walmart will pay them.

Note that I’m not saying the technology won’t have good uses (I’m sure it will). My prediction is just that we just won’t be talking about blockchain as a completely transformational technology in the supply chain anytime soon.

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