Still continuing our “the more things change, the more things stay the same” theme, back in 2008, the Supply Chain Digest published an article on Key Trends Impacting Supply Chain Management and Logistics for 2008 where it asked a number of leading academics and practitioners what they saw coming. (Their responses are summarized in this SI post.)

Nine (9) experts weighed in and provided 24 thoughts on what they saw coming in 2008. Those thoughts more-or-less fell into seven themes, and for the most part, those themes are the same themes today. Moreover, the specific concepts addressed are more-or-less the concepts being addressed today. Let’s continue to take them theme by theme and conclude our initial series.

Globalization

Three (3) of the nine (9) experts included globalization as a core theme and stated that they believed:

• Globalization will continue to take up a lot of organizational focus as companies try to efficiently and cost-effectively manage their global operations.
• Supply chain globalization is about to enter a new phase, driven by the recognition by many organizations that their initial off shoring decisions were made with a myopic focus on product cost, and not a thorough evaluation of total delivered cost.
• Freight volumes will continue to fall in the first half of 2008, but will stabilize by the second half of the year.

With the tariffs, global instability, and continually increasing natural disasters, globalization will continue to command organizational focus and attention.

As the pendulum swings back from full globalization to isolationism, we’re returning to an earlier time where trading partners are limited, friend-and-near-shoring is finally gaining traction, and pushes are being made for home-sourcing. (Which won’t happen until proper investments are made because, even with tariffs, it’s still cheaper to use someone else’s multi-million/billion dollar facilities than build your own.)

Freight volumes by country and route will continue to rise and fall as tariffs, oil price surges, recessions, sanctions, border closings and other contributing factors play a factor in actual consumer demand, available supply, and permissible routes.

Multi-Stage Manufacturing

Two (2) of the nine (9) experts included multi-stage manufacturing as a core theme and stated that they believed:

• More companies will resume manufacturing in-house.
• Multi-stage manufacturing that allows for decision postponement and re-purposing of parts in-line with fluctuations in demand across product lines will start to become common.

That didn’t really happen much as a result of the financial crisis or the carrier failures because it was still cheaper to outsource, but when tariffs, border closings, oil price surges, and other detrimental factors combine, companies take an analysis of in-house manufacturing seriously and as soon as it looks like it will be cheaper long-term to bring manufacturing back in house (which will happen if the government that pushes an isolationist strategy starts to actively invest in the industries it wants to nationalize / build / resurrect).

This has become common in electronics and control systems where components have been standardized across product variations, and even product lines, to the extent possible to allow for production plan updates and postponement as long as possible to reduce stock-outs in the product versions and lines in greatest demand and minimize overstocks in product versions and lines not selling as well as possible. However, with parts shortages bing common, you can see more and more products are going to be designed with the ability to use multiple components from multiple manufacturers with specs that are “similar enough”.

Green

Two (2) of the nine (9) experts included green supply chain as a core theme and stated that they believed:

• Activity & Hype around “Green” Supply Chain will continue.
• “Green” Logistics will continue to attract mind-share, but until profitability is proven, market-share will lag.

While the USA might be rolling back environmental legislation to (at least the) 1970s to please the tech bros so they can build their energy and water intensive data centers for Gen-AI (that can blackout and dry entire towns, while nearby energy plants pollute on a scale not seen in decades), as the same mega corps try to build similar massive data centers in the EU and other environmentally conscious countries, we will see a renewed effort to introduce new environmental legislation, that will renew a push for “green” supply chains in those countries.

Nothing has changed in the past two decades. When the economy is good and consumers have extra disposable income, they become interested in corporate responsibility and green, and the green hype sells. But the reality is that, like corporations, consumers like to virtue signal and when the rubber meets the road, or, more importantly, the plastic hits the terminal, they still won’t spend more than they need to for a product or service they want to fulfill a need.

This concludes our coverage of the market predictions from the thought leaders in 2008 and how nothing has really changed over the past two decades.