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Not the person you replied to, but let's talk about "global supply chain improvements" for example... When Amazon launched 2-day shipping with Prime, it was tru

Not the person you replied to, but let's talk about "global supply chain improvements" for example... When Amazon launched 2-day shipping with Prime, it was truly a landmark milestone, in terms of technology and operational prowess. I certainly wouldn't argue with you about the great impact that something like that had. But what came next? 1-day shipping? That's a 50% improvement, when the previous benchmark was 90+% improvement going from 4-6 weeks down to 2 days. That's exactly the kind of stagnation the author is describing. And what else happened in the past 30-50 years of supply chain optimizations? A worrying lack of investment in resiliency, in durability. COVID-induced supply shocks went from transient to semi-permanent, because by design much of our supply chain infrastructure has very little "slack" (because extra unused capacity is waste, and waste is lost profit), and thus no good way to catch-up, no good way to quickly retool, readjust, to shift manufacturing from one region to another, etc. (because, fragility is actually specialization which equals profit). I think the person you responded to sees more of the iceberg than you give them credit for. I think there's no reason to fall victim to lowered expectations, when pretending to be futurists/futurologists... why can't we have 1-/2-day shipping, "agile" supply chains, AND resiliency and durability and ability to recover from supply shocks? Why settle for just 1 aspect of remarkable changes, and stop there? Perhaps the world needs a few shocks to realize how much it is undervaluing the value of resiliency? In the grand scheme of things it was probably healthy to pop the stock market bubble of 1929, of the 2000s dotcom boom, and the real estate bubble in 2008. Will COVID pop the supply-chain bubble that we've built for ourselves, where we've incorrectly assessed the value of (i.e. actually the cost of), fragile supply chains?

aksss 5y ago
The GSC improvements aren't just about Amazon and trinkets. Other parts of this iceberg may include standard of living increases across the globe, the ability to open markets in a bidirectional way, global competitiveness, and lowering the barrier to entry for new product prototyping, development, and manufacturing (to name a few). That's also what came next. We have a pretty myopic view of the achievements when we just wonder why we can't get our Amazon trinket shipped faster; that was my point to OP. Regarding "why...stop there?", I'm not sure anybody has stopped. There are articles ad infinitum about supply chain resiliency bouncing around for the last year or so. No doubt the world had prioritized lower cost over resiliency. But why design a feature into a system if nobody values it? When people ascribe a critical level of value to a feature, it gets built. Seems like the planetary population of concerned individuals is thinking about it, and the wake-up calls have been coming in, right?

aksss 5y ago

The GSC improvements aren't just about Amazon and trinkets. Other parts of this iceberg may include standard of living increases across the globe, the ability to open markets in a bidirectional way, global competitiveness, and lowering the barrier to entry for new product prototyping, development, and manufacturing (to name a few). That's also what came next. We have a pretty myopic view of the achievements when we just wonder why we can't get our Amazon trinket shipped faster; that was my point to OP. Regarding "why...stop there?", I'm not sure anybody has stopped. There are articles ad infinitum about supply chain resiliency bouncing around for the last year or so. No doubt the world had prioritized lower cost over resiliency. But why design a feature into a system if nobody values it? When people ascribe a critical level of value to a feature, it gets built. Seems like the planetary population of concerned individuals is thinking about it, and the wake-up calls have been coming in, right?