Cooped up in quarantine, people everywhere are turning to bread-baking for comfort and fun. Unprecedented consumer demand for flour and yeast has strained suppliers, resulting in secondary markets and new businesses leveraging digital platforms.
Food waste is a major problem across the globe. Grocery retailers incur significant costs from this wastage, particularly in the produce category. Walmart is taking this problem head-on with analytics using ‘Eden’: a machine learning algorithm that screens produce for quality and freshness. This post explores Walmart's attempts to improve their food waste process with Eden.
Blue Yonder is a leader in end-to-end digital fulfillment, harnessing artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize supply chains across the globe. But could COVID-19 be the Black Swan event that breaks their value proposition to pieces?
Blackbuck is attempting to solve the inefficiencies in the Indian surface transport sector through a marketplace and technology-enabled services. Its impressive growth and recent funding have attracted various competitors – including one that questions the logistics platform business model itself.
FedEx is facing the threat of two of the most severe digital disruptors: Amazon and Uber. As e-commerce operations gain more relevance in supply chain distribution networks, the tech giant is aggressively increasing the vertical integration of its distribution network. In parallel, Uber and several digital innovators are introducing new business models in different steps of the supply chain, covering the shipping, freight, warehousing and last-mile verticals.
IKEA's investment in digital supply chain technology has improved operating efficiency of its furniture/food businesses as well as enhanced omni-channel customer experience.
Li & Fung, the Hong Kong-based supply chain and logistics giant, is aiming to digitalize every step of the retail supply chain. The objective is to make data flow seamlessly, providing better visibility to both customers and suppliers around the world, and enabling them to come up with faster and smarter business decisions.
How does fast fashion make any business sense? Zara uses intensive data and analytics to manage a tight supply chain and give customers exactly what they want.
On March 6th of this year, the supply chain management giant Li & Fung will be unceremoniously removed from the Hang Seng Index, a globally recognized index of Blue Chip Hong Kong Companies, to be replaced by Greely Automobile. It will mark the another step in the steep decline of a company which was once synonymous with outsourcing and cheap Asian manufacturing.
