Your Supply Chain Could Save Humanity
Christopher Moscardi
Marketing Strategist | Business Consultant | Recovering Creative Director | Optimistically Cynical Climate Communicator | MBA | Writer
I am embarrassed to say it, but I never thought too deeply about where my stuff comes from before. Like many in my generation I wanted to be sure that the food I am eating is organically sourced (we can debate the accuracy of food labeling another time), or the products I’m consuming are made from recycled materials as much as possible (we can also debate the efficacy of recycling programs another time), but the actual logistics behind getting something from raw material to finished product wasn’t on my radar.
That is until about a year and a half ago when two distinct (but tangentially related) events in my life led me down a path towards supply chain understanding.
The first was the pandemic, which disrupted the hell out of supply chains resulting in heavily publicized experiences of people searching frantically for household basics like toilet paper and bleach wipes. Still, car manufacturers are shelling out big money in buyback programs so they can harvest microchips that they can’t get through their regular suppliers.
The second was the start of my MBA program in which I have now taken (and will continue to take) several courses focusing on supply chain management.
As a result of those two events, I am writing this as a Senior Content Marketing Strategist, specifically supporting a business unit which handles a remarkable amount of supply chain transactions – 26 billion EDI transactions per year and $9 trillion in network commerce – across some of the biggest companies in the world so they are no slouch in understanding how to connect every single dot in a supply chain and, more importantly, how to make all the dots visible to everyone involved.
This is all to say that I now find myself deeply integrated in the fascinating process of how our stuff actually becomes stuff and then how it gets to our proverbial front doors.
I am also, to top it all off, an aspiring futurist. Or an amateur futurist. Or just someone who is infinitely intrigued by what the future holds for humanity. I am constantly considering the different avenues we might take as a species, searching for signals in the day’s news that point to outcomes 10, 50, 100 years from now, and trying to figure out how I – as a marketer – can help to usher in the more positive outcomes for our civilization.
Which brings me back to supply chains.
I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that supply chains, and in particular the resilience of those supply chains, will play a key role in saving humanity. To clarify, I’m not talking about saving the planet. The planet will be fine without us, of that I have no doubt. I’m talking about the continuation in perpetuity of the human experience.
By now we are all well aware of the effects of climate change, and whether you subscribe to the notion that it is man-made or not (it is), the fact remains that the climate is changing and we are seeing real-time ramifications throughout the natural world. Just this past week, Hurricane Ida gained enormous strength – going from a category 2 (105 mph winds) to a category 4 (150 mph winds) in record time – due to warmer ocean waters in the Gulf of Mexico and, as a result, decimated large parts of Louisiana, knocked out the power of millions across the American southeast, and was tragically took 82 lives across 8 different states (1). As I was writing this, flash flood warnings reached as far north as Boston due to the continued impact of the storm as it slogged its way up the east coast dumping amounts of rain “seen once in a century. (2)"
But if you think that the effects of these climate change weather events are limited to those in a flood plain or a fire zone … well, you haven’t been watching the news for the last year and a half. Consider this: according to McKinsey, “The probability of a hurricane of sufficient intensity to disrupt semiconductor supply chains may grow two to four times by 2040” or “the probability heavy rare earths production is severely disrupted from extreme rainfall may increase 2 to 3 times by 2030. (3)” To hear CNBC tell it, “floods in China and Europe, wildfires in the Western US, and drought in South America mean disruptions of everything from lumber to chocolate to sushi rice. (4)” Even physically getting to work (for those who can go back to the office) – that ever reliable human resources supply chain – is being disrupted by climate change. “Workplace disruptions caused by climate change could lead to more than $2 trillion in productivity losses by 2030, according to a recent report from the United Nations Development Program. (4)”
We can even consider the far-reaching effects of COVID-19, one of the most disruptive black swan events to ever take aim at the things we use every single day and the seminal event in putting supply chain importance into the daily news. And while COVID-19 isn’t linked to climate change, report after report can be found which shows that other infectious diseases, each of which have the potential to grind humanity to a halt if they grow to the same scope as COVID-19, are more likely to proliferate and spread as the planet gets warmer. (5)
And the experts say these trends will only get worse. According to the BBC, based on the most recent International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from the UN, “even if we get a handle on emissions and keep temperatures around 1.5C by 2100, the waters will continue to rise long into the future.” Valerie Masson-Delmotte, co-chair of the IPCC working group which prepared the report, says: “With gradual sea-level rise, those extreme sea-level events that have occurred in the past, just once per century, will occur more and more frequently in the future. (6)”
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But I’m not here to just rant and rave that “the end is nigh.” No, in fact all of this is a wake-up call to what should now be considered one of the most important roles in the Industry 4.0 world: the supply chain manager.
Given the climate change fueled propensity for extreme weather, be they hurricanes or wildfires or droughts or so on, humanity is squarely on a collision course with two options for survival: fix the house or pack up and move out. I won’t offer conjecture on one option over the other, but what’s become clear to me is that in either scenario without a chain of supplies we simply cannot achieve anything.
When we apply some foresight to our scenario, it becomes strikingly clear that for our species to survive we need to ensure that we can get the stuff we need for survival (and, one would hope, to not just survive but also thrive) from point a – raw material – to point z, the finished product where it needs to go. That finished product could be anything from the nuts and bolts that hold together our rockets bearing supplies for our newly founded moon colony or the metal spike that we’re going to run through many a high-quality baseball bat in order to fight off the climate change zombies. We will still very much rely on this stuff to live.
Enter the supply chain manager, one of the most important people in the survival of our species because it falls on their shoulders to develop the most resilient, secure, future-proof supply chains possible. That can be accomplished in myriad ways – from automated trading partner management so if one resource hub goes down an AI can automatically reroute production to another without missing a beat all the way to IoT enabled tracking on every piece of whatever it is you make for an incredibly detailed “bird’s eye view” of where all your stuff is, where it should be, how it’s getting there, and when. The more visibility and transparency we can build into our supply chains, the more likely we are to be able to react – or even in many cases preempt – disruptions that could lead to our untimely demise.
So step into the spotlight, supply chain manager. Make your supply chain as robust as you possibly can, the fate of our civilization may well be riding on it.
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