Data Is Eating the World: Supply Chain Innovation

Crunchbase:

Venture capital investors have lately taken a keen interest in the logistics, supply chain management and shipping market, which measures in the trillions of dollars globally and in the hundreds of billions of dollars in the US alone.

Based on data from 502 deals struck with US-based companies in the supply chain management, shipping and logistics industries, it’s easy to see that investor interest has been piqued by this supposedly “boring” space. Over the past several years, there’s been a significant upswing in the amount of capital deployed into upstart logistics, shipping and supply chain management companies… Between the start of 2013 and the end of 2016, the amount of venture capital money invested into these industries essentially tripled, a positive change of 297% in the space of four years.

Louis Columbus:

The scale, scope and depth of data supply chains are generating today is accelerating, providing ample data sets to drive contextual intelligence. The following graphic provides an overview of 52 different sources of big data that are generated in supply chains Plotting the data sources by variety, volume and velocity by the relative level of structured/unstructured data, it’s clear that the majority of supply chain data is generated outside an enterprise. Forward-thinking manufacturers are looking at big data as a catalyst for greater collaboration. Source: Big Data Analytics in Supply Chain Management: Trends and Related Research. Presented at 6th International Conference on Operations and Supply Chain Management, Bali, 2014

At the 2017 MIT Tech Conference,  Roboticist Helen Greiner, CTO of CyPhy Works, talked about her vision of an end-to-end automation of the supply chain, making it much more efficient than it is today. Greiner: “Up above the treetops is a highway waiting to be populated.”