Building the shopping 2020 supply chain

Online retail is growing faster than many of us expected. Consumers are ready and should be buying over 30% of their purchases online by 2020. Are retailers and manufacturers prepared for this? Are they ready to pick individual items in these quantities and prepare the corresponding shipments for the consumer? Some companies already act on the rapidly changing behavior of consumers. A good example is Amazon®. By using a clever business model, they can offer lower prices than retail giant Walmart. This will fuel their attractiveness for investors and will enable them to build state of the art supply chain capabilities. By now, in Germany alone, Amazon® already has 800.000 m2 of distribution space. Google® has started Google Express®, a 1 hour delivery service for Google Shopping®. What will be your answer to this?

Shopping 2020 will become the battle of supply chains. 2020 still looks far ahead but those who don’t take action now will be out of business tomorrow. If there is one conclusion we can draw from our research and vibrant discussions, it is the necessity to start moving now, in order to be ready on time for 2020! Are you prepared?

The expert group Supply Chain has compiled their expertise and insights in this report. It contains over 25 recommendations on how to build competitive supply chain competences over the next 6 years. The number of recommendations might look quite high, but condensing them would lead to a loss of practical insights. Reference cases have also been included to bring the recommendations alive.