Futurization

Our whole life is a fight against limitations on the way to achieving our desires. We are constantly fighting with our physical world for the right to provide all our needs here and now.

"Here and now" is the great dream of humanity. But the world has its own answer to our request. "Earn. Reach. Go", or better "Run". Therefore, for a modern person, "here and now", it means "to do everything as quickly as possible".

A little more than a hundred years ago, people did not really hope that something could be receive quickly, and waited patiently for weeks, months, and even years not only for necessary things, but also for relevant information. Since then, not much has changed with our desires, but we are confidently approaching to the solution of our dream, because technology has come to help us.

Needs.?

Before talking about the future, let's understand why a people wants to get everything "here and now".

Our needs are people’s motivation for action. Physical, related to ensuring the vitality of our organism, and mental, related to the existence of our personal "Ego".

In 1943, the journal "Psychological Review" published an article by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow entitled "The Theory of Human Motivation". His work is a classification system designed to reflect the universal needs of society and its separate individuals. Although Maslow did not present the constituent elements of needs in the form of a pyramid, often in society we hear the interpretation of his theory as "Maslow's Pyramid of Needs".

In the images below, basic physiological needs often appear, and higher at the top, - mental, spiritual.

First of all, to support vitality, the organism of a biological creature must be provided with energy, and quality food, water and air are its derivatives. Warm clothing preserves the received energy, and reliable housing ensures security of existence. Obtaining all of the above already creates tasks of different scales for each individual biological creature.

But the presence of only one need for energy would not give a reason for human existence in the long time. There are other motivators, and first of all, these are our sensations, which are based on the nervous and hormonal systems. We are motivated to maintain a comfortable physical state of our body. On the one hand, various negative sensations, including painful ones, stimulate us to ensure a comfortable physical state, but on the other hand, the positive sensations brought to us by the receptors of our body further stimulate us to find ways to satisfy our desires, which are transformed over time into the need. To all this we can add the feeling of the "Center of the Universe" of each person, which our inner psychological "Ego" provides us, and which is also our need and requires regular satisfaction in most people.

Sober thinking reduces the unconscious influence of these motivators and forces us to treat them more carefully and cautiously. But those who cannot control your desires become susceptible to their significant influence, and for most people, their lives, especially in countries with a well-developed level of economic, are an lifelong race for their satisfaction.

The priority of needs is often caused by the social culture where a person was born and lives. In European and American society, material needs are at a higher level than spiritual ones. But, for example, in Indian, priorities are often shifted on the contrary, towards the mental. For different layers of society, the priorities of needs are also different. When a person is free to worry about their basic physiological needs, they can focus more on the spiritual aspects of their lives. But, unfortunately, this is not always the case. Nevertheless, in every society there is a separate category of people who differ from the larger mass by a higher level of control over their desires and do not admit them to turn into needs.

Laziness.?

The laziness of a biological creature is a great invention of nature, able of saving energy and forcing to achieve goals in the most optimal ways. How this happens is described in detail by Joe Dispenza in his book "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One”. This is not an advertisement for his excellent book, although it is indeed one. In the book, the author describes in simple words at the level of the physiology of the body, why a person is lazy and lives a large part of his life in a pattern, sometimes without thinking about what and how he does it.

According to Joe Dispenza, our body is largely guided by patterned actions, without the active intervention of the brain. He calls patterned processes that are repeatedly performed and memorized by our body with the help of muscle cells, - muscle memory. These actions are performed by the body with minimal brain control. Do you remember the story about the centipede, which thought about how it moves all its legs at the same time and tried to do it consciously??After she thought about it, she couldn't walk anymore. Therefore, template processes are important for our body. Patterns free the brain from routine and unproductive waste of energy, and force it to worry about controlling what is happening outside the body. Therefore, laziness, primarily of our brain, is means of saving the body's energy. And it came from our distant past, when food supplies were unpredictable. This is still the case with wild animals. Energy expenditure in adult animals is observed during the period of short-term food production, for example, hunting. But most of the time the animals are relaxed.

And it is for this reason that the brain does not like to leave its comfort zone. He likes the body to be at rest, or in the worst case, performed the work that it knows, basic on the formed muscle memory.

Therefore, no matter how strange it sounded, human laziness plays a huge role in the development of our society. On the one hand, people need to provide for their needs in order to support the physical state of the body at the right level, but on the other hand, we need to spend our own energy, which the brain does not like to do. That is why he is looking for ways to achieve his goal with the most optimal ways. Remember, most of all inventions are aimed at making a person do fewer actions and this leads him to the result as quickly as possible, because managing something or someone brings a significant saving of energy than doing it yourself. The axe and the knife, machines and factories, automobiles and planes, and even management were invented. In the modern world, we began to spend much less energy personally, and at the same time we achieve the result much faster and more accurately. Humanity constantly strives to increase the efficiency of an important indicator: the amount of energy spent when achieving the required result. And the main goal of people is to satisfy their desires and needs "here and now", as we value an important resource of our life, - time, which is a limited resource, and with minimal energy loss, because this is what nature instilled in us. Everything happens as before, when a person was occupied with only one thing: survival. More food to replenish energy to be the fastest and strongest to survive and continue your lineage.

Since then, nothing has changed. Our body still requires the satisfaction of its basic needs, and we also try to provide ourselves with comfort and safety, with the maximum possible safe of energy. And our brain helps us in this. More advanced than ancient man was, but just as lazy as ever.

So where is human evolution headed??If we take everything that was said above, then people seek to satisfy their needs and desires "here and now" and with minimal spending of energy. Whatever we touch, we want to receive everything just like that.

The purpose of this article is not to teach how to live. Each of us chooses the goals of our existence in this world individually. All of the above was said from only one point of view - to understand our motives and what kind of future we will build. And we will limit ourselves only to the topic that interests us the most - some aspects of supply chain management in the future.

Supply chains.?

If we look carefully at supply chains, we will see only four dual groups: owner and customer, resources and flows. The customer always wants to receive the product on time and place that is acceptable for him, and often it is "here and now". At the same time, he, as a real consumer, wants to get it for the lowest price. The business owner has the opposite desires. He wants to get the maximum profit from the sale of his product, but at the same time minimize his costs to the sales process, including its initial (goods) cost. When using resources and energy carriers involved in the supply chain, he acts as an ordinary consumer. Therefore, in any supply chain we always see the same principles: the client wants to receive a product or service quickly and where it is convenient for him, and for the minimum cost, and the owner of the system wants to get the maximum price from the sale, but at the same time spend the minimum amount of money on resources inside the supply chain. It has always been so, and these same principles will influence the development of humanity in the future.

When we talk about the sales process, it consists of several important stages.

The first is the definition or awareness of the primary need by the consumer. It is important to understand that the primary need is at the beginning of the sales process and can be developed, modified and supplemented. Do you remember how in one of the chains of fast food restaurants they sell "fries", "drink" or "pie" additionally to order??And this tool is increasingly being used by other players in the B2C market. A good example of the development of this option is the modification of the process of selling goods in one of the Ukrainian gas station chains, which was the first in this business segment to implement active sales, and it does so by almost 5 out of 5 points. Why did we give this score??Because an element of individuality is added to active selling. Firstly, the seller appeals to you by the name that he sees on the monitor screen from the SRM system after identifying your loyalty card, secondly, he offers products that you prefer according to your purchase history or offers current promotional proposal, and thirdly, has a sincere communication. And this raises the mood of the client, and a positive emotion is added to the sales process.

In the future, this option will develop significantly. We will see the widespread adoption of personal selling elements in all business segments, and this method will effect a change in the primary need towards increasing the amount of the cashier's check to the point of payment by the consumer.

Today, it is believed that individual sales are more used in the B2B segment. But the experience of the companies listed above proves that individual sales can be developed in the B2C segment as well. The implementation of these methods is helped by customer loyalty programs integrated into the work of SRM systems, and even internal staff motivation programs. And today we already see that artificial intelligence is added to help with this. In the near future, artificial intelligence will be able not only to control salespeople how they execute sales "scripts", but also to completely replace a person in the sales process. Can you imagine a gas station or a store where every word, phrase and behavior of the seller is monitored and evaluated by an intelligent system??Or a point of sale where there is no staff, but the processes of communication with the buyer have been taken over by robotic systems taking into account artificial intelligence??And we will see this already in the near future, and its acceleration and large-scale implementation depends, first of all, on the payback of such systems, which will be influenced by the cost of investments and the level of employee wages. But these factors can only delay the use of artificial intelligence in sales, but not cancel it.

Another stage in the sales process is product selection. We do not specifically say "next", because the need may not always be formed before the presentation of the product or service. The very "showcase of the product" can form the need of the consumer. Modern marketing is built on this principle. There is no doubt that product and service presentations will evolve and become more personalized based on personal preferences, but not limited to that. Each client will have its own personal "showcase", that is, we will see an increasingly developed personalized approach to each client separately.

But in order to understand how this tool will develop, let's remember how it has evolved over the past few decades.

Not only before, but also in our time, in order to buy the right product and evaluate it, we need to go to a store, and maybe not just one. It takes a lot of time, and this process is far from the concept of "here and now". Therefore, the digital interpretation of the storefront will bring it as close to the consumer as possible. However, if a century and half ago, you could not even think about seeing a sample of the product and its characteristics on the screen of your phone, then today everything has changed. The shop window has moved from the physical world to the digital one, and the means of communication and visualization on the screens of stationary and mobile computers have made it possible to make it closer to the real world. However, the showcase is still far from its ideal. You cannot try on clothes unless you are in the store or they have not been physically delivered directly to you. You cannot choose a thing and put it in a room to assess how well it will fit into the interior. You cannot estimate with greater probability how much a gift will meet the need of your friend. You will not be able to assess the tactile quality of the product, its taste and smell. We are sure - all this is in the future.

In our time, certain Internet resources and mobile applications have begun to appear that allow you to "play" with such modeling at a primitive level, but so far, all these attempts are far from ideal. As always, we humans want more. We would like to take a virtual thing and try it on, while remaining in a place where it is convenient for us. Most likely, in the near future, there will be some gadgets that will simulate any objects and things in a holographic or other way, and you will be able to broadcast the necessary full-scale image of any object from this gadget, in one place or another, to estimate?how suitable the interior item is for your apartment, or if it is clothing, by entering this image, you will be able to evaluate yourself in new clothes, standing in front of a mirror, as you would in a change room, and even possibly an individual assistant based on artificial?intelligence would be able to model your community's thoughts on these changes. And when choosing gifts for other people, the artificial intelligence would assess how much they will like the gift or not, and even recommend specific suggestions to you for your friends and loved ones, knowing or evaluating their preferences. And maybe its would also order them for you. We think that in the near future such personal assistants will appear in the form of separate programs that you can use.

In the future, when choosing products, we will have more interaction with virtual digital images than with physical ones, although it does not make sense to discount the prompt delivery of products or samples. But this method becomes more energy-consuming than its digital counterparts and requires additional resources, including time. Therefore, the advantages will shift towards digital visualization. The shop window will become fully accessible anywhere and at any time to the customer, in a digital form close to its physical form. For this, we will need to further develop communication systems with a huge throughput, which have the ability to transmit much larger amounts of information in a shorter amount of time than today. And this can be a key factor in the pace of human development.

As for virtual, informational products, nowadays we have come significantly closer to the realization of the concept of selling goods "here and now". We can buy the software product as quickly as possible and it will be delivered to your gadget instantly. Buying tickets for transport services does not take much time, as it was 20 years ago. If earlier we had to go to the ticket office, stand in line, and it is not a fact that you can buy the necessary ticket for a train or plane, today you will instantly get all the necessary information in a matter of seconds, and you will be able to buy the necessary ticket for any transport, which will be delivered to your gadget. We have already learned to transfer large volumes of information over thousands of kilometers almost instantly, but this is not enough, and we must have ways for development in this matter.

In the future, we will see the development of optimization of purchases of necessary goods and services with more optimized actions and means, when unproductive user actions and waiting time will be removed from the processes. We are already seeing various, so far primitive, but optimized methods, such as, for example, “one-click purchase”. Based on this concept, physical gadgets become more of a burden than a help. In the future, people will need more advanced forms of processing and possession of personal information, more integrated with the human body and nervous system than the gadgets that exist today. Large commercial enterprises specializing in the production of modern technology will inhibit the process of transition to more advanced forms, as was the case with the use of electric cars, when oil production companies blocked the transition to the use of ecologically clean fuel as much as possible. However, the evolution cannot be stopped, and we will still see gadget-free information management. Most likely, such means will be implanted in the human body and connected to the nervous system directly. Thus, humanity has the opportunity to go beyond pure biological existence. And this will apply even to payment systems.

Money, a wonderful optimized way of exchange. If humanity went through the stage of using physical money for a long time, from stone money in the most ancient times to paper money in our time, today we have begun to free ourselves from this dependence, as monetary payments are also moving into the digital world. Many of us have practically stopped using the physical money. it’s true in Ukraine. We receive our income and wages on virtual current accounts, from where we make all payments using our gadgets and universal plastic cards. Here too, the world wants to replace physical kind with digital ones. It is important to understand that in the future world, the concept of "here and now" is still more of an informational kind than a physical one. However, nowadays we are still dependent on physical means of payment. So, it is not difficult to conclude that payment systems will also develop in the future and can be integrated directly into the human body by gadgets. A person in the future will be more and more connected to clean information flows, and will strive to own more protected and fast-acting technologies than an ordinary modern smartphone.

Rejection of physical money and the development of blockchain technologies will legalize the total money supply and make it more transparent for the state, which will increase control over each person. The process of abandoning physical money will not be quick and easy for obvious reasons, but year after year the share of digital transactions in interpersonal payments will increase. People will be more and more integrated into society, and their whole lives will be under greater control and will be more accessible to others than today.

Speed.?

If everything is more or less clear with the speed of information, the speed of physical flows is still the most important and difficult to solve aspect in supply chains, especially in the delivery of the "last mile". Today, it is still difficult to say how the delivery of physical goods will change. Today, clearly defined trends have not formed and one can only fantasize about this topic. The world is trying different options and trying to understand how it should further develop in the segment of supplying physical goods to the customer, adhering to the concept of "here and now". And if humanity has made a huge leap in implementing the concept of "here and now" in the delivery of information, "showcases" in the form of digital presentations and means of payment already today, then in the delivery of physical goods, especially large-sized ones, we have remained at almost the same level, and we decide this task is to increase the number of regional warehouses and "dark-stores", which, unfortunately, will not be abandoned in the near future. We still have to work on solving this difficult task, because the client wants to receive their physical order "here and now". In the end, a person can conclude that any physical form is already a significant limitation. And fantastic films, which describe races that have transformed from biological to information and energy entities, from the point of view of the above, from the point of view of the implementation of the "here and now" concept, do not seem such an impossible dream. And who knows, maybe humanity will choose the path of replacing the physical entity with an information one??Everything is possible, and step by step we are already becoming more perfect, and from time to time we ask ourselves the main question: what fate does a humanity prepare for himself, with his own hands?

If you take into account everything that has been said, you can draw several important conclusions. The main trends in the development of supply chains will lie in the implementation of the concept of meeting the needs of customers "here and now". For its implementation, we will see the development of not just information technologies, but a significant transformation of the physical into a digital kind. Among them, we expect the development of a more individual approach to sales, including a product "showcase", in all industries based on SRM systems and its analogues, and the use of advanced artificial intelligence systems. Not very quickly, but we will still see the development of vehicles and delivery methods for transporting goods both on trunk channels and especially on the "last mile" to increase speed and accuracy in customer service. All activities will be focused on reducing of resources and their cost reduction in the supply channels, and increasing the speed of the flow.

Humanity will implement further the concept of "here and now".

Prepared by: Bogdan Yakovlenko