MHI Solutions Improving Supply Chain Performance
Just a scant three years after the debut of the original U.S. Roadmap for Material Handling & Logistics, Version 2.0 of the report and action plan will be released at ProMat 2017.
As an update of the preceding document, U.S. Roadmap for Material Handling & Logistics 2.0 (Roadmap 2.0) is intended to help the supply chain industry determine how it needs to change between now and 2030. Gary Forger, who spearheaded the effort to develop the original document, shepherded the creation of Roadmap 2.0 in his role as a consultant for MHI. The goal of both reports is to grow jobs, increase America’s global competitiveness and advance our standard of living.
“The first Roadmap was called by some ‘the most important document to be published by the industry in more than 20 years,’” recalls Forger. “It established a baseline of key disruptors faced by supply chain practitioners today and in the approaching decade. While it was comprehensive for the time, the staggering rate of change in the field during the past three years prompted the creation of this second edition.”
Just as the original Roadmap was a high-level look, so is 2.0, notes Forger. “It’s not possible to examine everything that’s changing within the supply chain from a street-level perspective,” he says. “Instead, we’ve taken a new approach in organizing the 2.0 report, focusing on four key supply chain forces: technology, consumers, workforce and logistics infrastructure. We’ve tried to capture the changes within these four forces, their impact on supply chains, and the importance of these shifts looking forward to 2030.”
As before, Roadmap 2.0’s content is based on input from nearly 200 strategic thinkers, 70 percent of whom did not participate in the development of the first Roadmap. Their numbers included material handling and logistics practitioners, equipment and software suppliers, academia, associations and government. Participants attended at least one of five face-to-face roundtable events held August through November 2016, hosted in Atlanta, GA; Trenton, NJ; Ontario, CA; Tucson, AZ; and Chicago, IL.
By Brian Reaves, MHI Executive Vice President