Sydney Harbour & Supply Chain Challenges

“Now don’t be jealous, I’m not on holiday. This is Rob O’Byrne from Logistics Bureau. And I’m sad to tell you, this is where I live in Sydney – I don’t quite have a view like this though. We’ve got a glorious weather here today and I’m on the Harbour View Hotel in Sydney, where we’ve just finished one of our free seminars.

We have some sensational discussion going on with some our clients and industry colleagues there and I thought I’d just share two or three of the key points with you ’cause it was really fascinating stuff.

We talked about two to nine topics. One was how the sort of global economies are changing and some of the things that might impact our Supply Chain in the future and then we talked more about getting our Supply Chain focused. Some of the economical things that we were talking about was how the shift of the central gravity of the global economy is moving. It used to be in the Middle East a thousand years ago, then it moved to Europe during the industrial revolution, then moved out to Mid-Atlantic, and then over the last few decades we see that central gravity hurtling back towards Asia. And actually for us here in Australia, the centre of that economy for the future is going to be much around China or India. And in fact if you draw a circle of where more than half of the people on the world live, its north of us here in Australia, where it China is really at the centre.

So we were talking about the impact of our businesses and on how we’re quite lucky being on the periphery on that huge demand in the future. Although there was some things to be worried as well, because we talked about the growth of Giga Cities. At the moment, at about 50% of the world population lives in what is known to be Giga Cities and this huge density cities, it will be about 80% by the year 2050. And we talked about this high density living in this cities centres is going to make Logistics and Supply Chain so much harder trying to get in this narrow streets in our cities, so many pedestrian only areas now in some of these large cities.

And we talked about how some places around the world – like Bangkok, and we heard from a guy from the Netherlands, where trucks are no longer allowed into the city centres. They have to cross dock their products in hubs around the cities and then the products into the city centres into smaller vehicles.

And during the second half of the session, we were talking about the need to get clarity and focus around the Supply Chain and something that challenges the people around the Supply Chain Management. And we talked about a couple of techniques of really understanding your customers’ needs, on your stakeholders’ needs and getting everybody in the business focused on what you are really trying to achieve with your Supply Chain and to make not only your Supply Chain more effective and the business more effective as well.

And I’ll put a couple of links in this video to some blog post and some articles which will help you understand much more. And finally, we were talking about more people engage not just with the right KPIs and the right performance measures but connecting emotionally as well to make sure that people really understood what we’re trying to achieve in our businesses and Supply Chain.

So for those who were not able to come in the event, don’t worry too much! I’ll put some link below the video to sort of information what we’re talking about and hopefully we’ll see you in one of our events soon and hopefully the weather will be like this.”

For further information on some of the topics we discussed, you might want to check out: