This is the fourth
post of a six-part blog series focused on the effects of Blockchain and the IoT
Revolution on logistics and supply chain management.
This week, we are going to evaluate how
supply chain professionals should view the implementation of IoT in their work.
There are countless benefits of this technology, but it is still important to
be careful when investing in new solutions.
First off, the supply chain field already has
been and will be tremendously impacted by the prevalence of IoT-connected
devices. Many mundane tasks, such as manually counting inventory, are things of
the past at modern companies. It is also not discriminatory of any industry; from
food and retail to software and oil, any type of business can utilize IoT in
its operations.
The world is driving towards productivity
increase in many ways (e.g. autonomous vehicles, automation tools), and IoT is
just another innovation that can help. According to the International Data
Corporation, the end of 2018 will see digitally connected processes drive
productivity for manufacturing supply chains up by 15%. With increased
productivity, people will have more time to focus on other aspects of their business
that are not digitized.
If IoT is this helpful, why shouldn’t
companies just jump at every opportunity to incorporate IoT into their
business? A pitfall that many companies will face is investing in too many different
IoT solutions. Not only is that costly, it can actually decrease
productivity because of the time it takes to engage with every device. It’s
the same reason why people don’t download every single utility app on their
phones; it’s only convenient to have the ones that you use a lot.
Now that we’ve discussed the ways that supply
chain professionals can view IoT, we will move on to addressing the conflicting
interests of other stakeholders in next week’s blog post.
