Business must reimagine the roles of supply chains and the people who work in them – not simply push existing models to their limits, writes Ian Middleton

drone

As anyone who follows me on Twitter will know, I’ve long questioned the point of autonomous vehicles. If anyone knows the answer, feel free to tweet me. But it seems the concept of driverless vehicles is something we’ve all recently had to come to terms with, in a different way.

I refer of course to the lorry driver shortage that has led not only to empty shelves in your favourite supermarket but also to the delicious irony of people like Leave-backing Lord Wolfson complaining about the government’s fabled post-Brexit points-based immigration policy, which he has admitted is an underlying cause. 

As one of the most high-profile Brexiteers, heard on many occasions saying how he didn’t think leaving the EU would affect his business, it’s difficult not to let out a barely concealed guffaw at his realisation that the sunlit uplands promised by the Leave campaign have led to embarrassing sunburn.

“Now retailers themselves are experiencing the vagaries of the ‘sorry we missed you’ conundrum”

Yet finding drivers or riders inside the UK seems to be less problematic, as the recent figures on local delivery services like Just Eat have shown. There has also been an explosion in services offering same-day grocery deliveries that are likely to give companies like Ocado something to chew on, which is especially awkward for them given the recent negative publicity about the pay and conditions of their own drivers.

If lockdown taught us anything, it’s that delivery partners have a far greater value than some may have previously have realised. We can throw money, talent and resources at the most eye-catching offers from perfectly polished websites, but if you don’t have an efficient supply chain from manufacturer to consumer, you’re only going to be selling disappointment.

Now retailers themselves are experiencing the vagaries of the ‘sorry we missed you’ conundrum. As ‘just in time’ becomes ‘just too late’, we see the weaknesses in a disparate supply chain that treats lorries as mobile warehouses. This has the most impact on store layouts that have kept storage space to a minimum.

Online might become a victim of its own success

At the height of the pandemic, nearly half of consumers reported problems with online deliveries with some reporting financial losses of as much £20. If that was translated to a physical store experience there would be riots in the high street. But you only have to read a few one-star Amazon reviews to see that online consumers often cannot be bothered to deal with returns, preferring instead to leave confidence-damaging comments. 

It wasn’t so long ago that Amazon was regularly mooting the idea of delivery by drone, something they seem to have gone uncharacteristically quiet about of late. In a world where retail bosses launch themselves into orbit on a whim, maybe it’s not as bizarre as I previously thought. 

“Sustainable consumerism may be an oxymoron but it’s a circle we need to square if online retail isn’t to collapse under the weight of its own success”

Amazon certainly seems to be cracking the delivery nut better than most, but at what cost? Recent revelations about their reverse logistics and warehousing processes would suggest that a criminal amount of waste and environmental damage were seen as a price worth paying for the Prime directive. But who really foots that bill? 

Sustainable consumerism may be an oxymoron but it’s a circle we need to square if online retail isn’t to collapse under the weight of its own success. To answer my own question about autonomous vehicles: might we at some point in the future see self-driving electric vehicles roaming around our streets using a high-tech trebuchet to launch volleys of parcels at our front doors? Compared to the experience at the hands of some of the more notorious delivery companies, that may actually be an improvement.

But serious joined-up solutions need to be found across the retail spectrum to what is becoming an increasingly overburdened supply and fulfilment chain. As we’ve already seen, simply pushing traditional delivery and warehousing modes beyond their limits isn’t going to work logistically, morally or environmentally. 

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