The Week of November 27th: 10 things eft's been reading
Throw-back Thursday with Jeff Bezos, EV debate, the real USP of the Tesla Truck and a rant on supply chain making itself look sexy.
1. [VIDEO] Black Friday/Cyber Monday – one man comes to mind. Here’s a 60 minutes interview with him back in 1999. Incredible. ‘Jeff Bezos and Amazon – An Inside Look’ [Youtube]
2. Is there even a future for retail? ‘A New Era of Retail Is Coming.’ [Business of Fashion]
3. Merc’s drone tests are going well. ‘Mercedes Plans More Drone Deliveries After 100 Perfect Flights.’ [Bloomberg]
4. Amazon looks to arm itself on all fronts. ‘Amazon Focuses on Machine Learning to Beat Cloud Rivals.’ [Bloomberg]
5. I wonder if this is necessarily going to be the future trend as warehousing becomes more strategic and customer-centric than about volume. ‘Average size of U.S. warehouses has doubled since 2002, CBRE report finds.’ [DC Velocity]
6. A really interesting take on the environmental cost of electric vehicles. It’s really easy to ignore where most electricity comes from (not renewables). That being said, many other studies suggest this might not be the case in the US actually…. [Freightwaves and Union of Concerned Scientists]
7. Here's an interesting reason for so much interest in the Tesla Truck – and it isn’t the environment. ‘3PLs place premium on Tesla's trucks for its AI.’ [SupplyChainDive]
8. Logistics companies are cluing in more and more to innovation. ‘Ryder Joins Plug and Play, Promotes Supply Chain Innovation.’ [Nasdaq]
9. Brexit borders might be a nightmare for supply chains. ‘How Will The Supply Chain Handle Hard Borders? The Post-Brexit Ireland-UK Border.’ [Forbes]
10. The supply chain struggles to attract the top talent to its doors. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them is that it isn’t very good at selling itself. As a kid in high school or college and you come across the term supply chain, where’s the first place you go? (Google à Wikipedia). Here’s the entirety of what the Wikipedia entry has to say about ‘The Role of the Internet in Supply Chain’…. ‘With the emergence of Internet, customers can directly contact the buyers. This, in effect, has reduced the channel up to a great extent. Initially the supply chain was longer and it used to cost more. Internet has cut down the middlemen like retailers and distributors. Now the supply chain has reduced to manufacturer, distributor, online platform to the ultimate consumers. Some of the benefits are cost reduction, value creation and better collaboration.’ Not exactly exciting is it. [Wikipedia]