Britt Spencer
As the pandemic has shown, while world trade worked well when trade routes ran smoothly, disruption can lead to chaos. For example, in a 2018 report on the future of food supply chains, consulting firm ARUP found that only eight percent of companies in the industry believed they had a truly agile supply chain that could respond quickly to disruptions.
In 2021 we will turn the long supply chains and just-in-time principles of manufacturing and trading on their head. And as the pandemic continues to disrupt global supply chains, we will also change our attitudes towards the idea of repairing rather than replacing goods.
Technology has already improved the way we move things between our cities and states. The pressure to reduce CO2 emissions from freight transport has led to better route planning, lower fuel costs and smarter use of different and less polluting delivery mechanisms. Companies such as DHL and UPS have driven this trend, investing in logistics startups and working on in-house innovations such as indoor robots and an online platform for freight forwarding. This trend will continue in 2021.
Drones and robotics will also play a small role in improving deployment mechanisms. In 2020, Amazon expanded its test of Amazon Scout delivery robots in the United States to two more cities. And in 2021, Starship Technologies, based in San Francisco, which is already testing autonomous delivery robots in Washington, DC, Irvine, California, and Milton Keynes, UK, plans to expand to 100 U.S. universities.
Despite these advances, however, we will not see the end of human delivery drivers just yet. Management costs and challenges will keep drones and robots from becoming the norm. In the UK, regulations on where drones can and cannot be flown could reduce their prevalence. And not all delivery robots are smart enough to adapt to some of the challenges of real cities. One of the Starship Technologies robots fell into a canal in Milton Keynes.
In manufacturing, the core technology – 3D printing – which was heralded in its early days as a kind of overheated version of the just-in-time system, will expand, but like drones and robots, it is also proving to be slow to move around to maintain his promise. Many industries have concerns about the speed of 3D printing and the reliability of 3D printed parts.
Comments are closed.