10 Reasons Why It’s A Great Time To Be In Supply Chain and Logistics Management

Are you considering a career change and wondering about Supply Chain Management or Logistics? Supply Chain and Logistics managers, supervisors and team leaders will be in high demand and almost indispensable.

The moving market

By 2025, more than half the world’s population will have joined the consuming classes, driving annual consumption in emerging markets to $30 trillion.  Now more consumers require goods and services and it is the logistics manager who makes sure that consumers worldwide receive what they want, when and how they want it.

With all these new consumers along with a new and wealthy market in the ageing population, there is no doubt that this is a high-growth industry. However, if surety of job prospects is not of itself enough, well, there is so much more to this exciting industry. Let’s whet your appetite with the following 10 points.

10 Reasons Why You Should Get into Logistics

1. First off the technology is rapidly evolving and developing and not just in IT applications – consider robotics and other flexible automations as well as wireless intelligence, augmented reality and artificial intelligences. 3D printing is becoming more applicable and enabling autonomous logistics.
2. The enormous impact the internet has had and continue to have on the connectedness between intelligent objects, smart packages and load units with intelligent and machine-to-machine grids. Not to mention all the smart applications that come from this including driverless trucks and cars, drones and so on.
3. Specific IT applications with sophisticated cloud technologies enable almost every function in the supply chain and, at the retail end the omni-channel business models, utilising: outlets: Pop-ups;  e-commerce sites social and mobile sites; catalogues; flash sales and other seasonal and single-use channels.
4. The growth of urbanisation and the enormous global shift toward mega cities with the incredible challenges they bring to logistics and supply chain managers who will need to find solutions to manage congestion and distribution – better known as the last mile or the final leg of the product life-cycle. Did you know that, by 2025, 3 out of 5 people globally will live in cities? This will enable multimodal urban deliveries from the very fast trains, to locker-boxes and other innovative distribution points.
5. The other big move that urbanisation and congestion has played a major part in is the move to social networks and crowd-based concepts such as crowd logistics with crowd-sourcing, crowd-shipping, crowd funding, crowd navigation and crowd-mining and web-screening.

1. The huge variety of potential applications exposes the supply chain to web fragmentation and cyber-attacks which will see managers looking for solutions to web security, privacy protection and cryptography as well as further improving risk management systems and processes.
2. All these new and still emerging innovations are enabling new ways of logistics management including anticipatory logistics that utilises volume forecasting and predictive capacity utilisation, which is a whole new sub-industry in cloud logistics including logistics as a service (LaaS), Logistics mall, Supply Chain-as-a-service (SCaaS) and on-demand SCM.
3. The launch of Galileo and around 900 new satellites scheduled for 2020 will enable new navigation and communication technologies as well as enable multiple innovations in machine-to-machine communications, mobile satellite services as well as increase further the broadband speed. This will encourage innovation in localised and location intelligences utilising light field communications and Bluetooth low energy along with traffic management systems and GPS data that will provide real-time location information that will deliver precise information.
4. The move to the virtual world will also see a move to more crypto-currencies and crypto-payment options along with the concept of super-grid logistics.
5. Finally, all these innovations will need to fall within a sustainable business model with pressure mounting on the entire industry to implement sustainable business practices and new trends such as ‘innovating to zero’ and the ‘circular economy’ – both of these are becoming popular within the industry and the customers the industry services.

The point here is that the logistics and supply chain manager is at the centre of all these changes and innovations and making decisions as to how best to utilise what, when and how to provide the very best service possible while also generating healthy profits.

Do you want a challenge and to work at the heart of a business with access to the most innovative, cutting-edge technology? If so, then supply chain and logistics management is definitely the job to be in!