by Craig Simon, President and CEO at FedEx SupplyChain
For most of history, the supply chain that links the world together today would have been unimaginable. The road to market is now a superhighway. It is a 24/7 operation. Global trade does not sleep. In fact, it never even pauses for a nap. Wheels on the ground, wings in the sky, keels in the water connect a largely borderless world economy.
At the same time, supercharged as the global superhighway may already be, no one in the shipping industry doubts that faster, cheaper, safer, simpler remain the fundamental currency of success for anyone in the shipping business. The world’s insomniac global companies demand, and deserve, nothing less.
That might suggest that the supply chain of the future will need to look quite different. There are even sci-fi visions of a Star Trek-style teleport option, 3-D printing, a super-premium service able to move goods through cyberspace, like auto parts for example, from a plant in China to a factory floor in the United States. It’s an intriguing possibility.