I am now a little more than a week back from the 2024 Gartner Supply Chain Symposium at Disney World in Orlando.
Last week, I offered some brief comments on the conference as a whole, which has its roots in the Supply Chain Executive Conference started by analyst firm AMR Research in the 1990s, before Gartner acquired AMR in 2009.
As I noted last week (see Trip Report: Gartner Supply Chain Symposium 2024), Gartner has applied a significant amount of marketing and organizational muscle to the event, which continues to gain momentum. This year, attendance was north of 3500, certainly another all-time record.
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Many companies there – including some very large ones - are struggling with the use cases and the business cases for warehouse robotics.  |
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I also summarized the opening day Gartner keynote from analyst Tom Enright, which laid out a path for reaching a new state that he called “supply chain drive,” much better than the fate of many/most companies, the much less attractive condition of “supply chain drift.”
The Gartner show has an ever-growing number of breakout sessions, a large number of which are sponsored sessions, in which for a princely sum vendors can present a point of view, a product, or a case study.
Nothing the matter with that, but as I've also said before, you just have to look closely and know whether a session is vendor sponsored or not before you commit.
Likely due to the overall increase in breakouts, for the second year in a row Gartner cut the regular breakouts down to just 30 minutes (vs 45 in the past).
There is some goodness in these shorter sessions for sure, but some felt rushed, and none of the ones I attended had any time left for questions.
I attended a number of breakout sessions at the show and will summarize a couple of them here.
On Monday, analyst Mike Dominy offered some advice on building Supply Chain as a Service (SCaaS) capabilities. What does that mean?
Dominy said involves expanding your supply chain externally to drive incremental revenue.
It is already a huge business, some $300 billion worth in North America Dominy said, but with a catch – almost all of that market consists of third party logistics, contract manufacturing and other well-known services.
Still, Dominy said, here are a number of companies creating a significant amount of revenue by commercializing their supply chain capabilities.
There are three key steps every company must take to move down this path, Dominy said, and while they are basic, key elements of each step are often overlooked. The three steps are:
• Define It
• Develop It
• Deploy It
In defining the service, it is typically some combination of assets plus digital offering that can drive the new revenue stream.
There are many types of assets that can come into play, including physical, intellectual property, expertise, business processes and more.
In defining the service, it is typically some combination of assets plus digital offering that can drive the new revenue stream.
There are many types of assets that can come into play, including physical, intellectual property, expertise, business processes and more
In developing the offering, defining the route(s) to market is key. This is an area, Dominy says, that many companies do not give adequate attention to when developing the services offering.
Will a field sales force need to be developed – a huge and generally expensive proposition? Dominy said rarely can the service be sold well by a company’s existing salesforce.
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This is all some tough sledding, Dominy said, noting that for most SCaaS efforts to succeed requires creating a dedicated business unit that focusses on the solution.
Nice job by Dominy.
 I also attended a couple of sessions led by my friend Dwight Klappich, the first on the release of this year’s “Magic Quadrant” for Warehouse Management Systems, the other an “ask the expert” event in which Klappich fielded questions from group of about 25 attendees on the ROI from warehouse automation.
Let’s start with the latter one first, which I sort of snuck into after being late trying to reserve a spot. It was very interesting. Many companies there – including some very large ones - are struggling with the use cases and the business cases for warehouse robotics, and through the discussion one thing became clear to me: this is an area where the industry simply needs a lot more expertise.
A number of interesting points were made. One attendee asked how can you quantify the return for robotics pursued due to the warehouse labor shortage. Another attendee said they estimated what they would have to raise wages to in order to close the labor gap, and then applied that to the full labor pool to come up with a number.
Klappich continued to note that advantages of mobile robots versus traditional automation in terms of costs, scalability and flexibility down the road.
This was a tough session to lead (lots of varied questions) and Klappich did an outstanding job.
In the WMS session, Klappich pitched the concept of what it call Warehouse Operations Management (WOM), in which WMS is just one component along with Warehouse Execution Systems, Labor Management, Yard Management, Multi-Agent Robot Orhestration, and several others..
He also said we should expect soon a new generation of WMS solutions that are easier to use, are more agile, and (of course) leverage AI.
I think I will leave it there, saving some additional breakout summaries for a Part 3.
What is your reaction to this review of Gartner 2024? What would you add? Let us know your thought at the Feedback section below.
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