THE SUPPLY CHAIN OF THE FUTURE
As once said by ‘Sir Charles Darwin’ that, “ it is not the strongest of the species that survive nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

We knew that the markets and supply chains are always in a constant state of dynamic change and adaptation. However, we can observe that the rate of change has accelerated to such a point that, the business models that have served us well in the past may no longer work today and will, almost certainly, not work at all tomorrow.
We have moved a long way from a business environment where the supplier held the power – say it for the ownership of resources, or technology and brands – to a situation where the customer, or even the consumer, is now in the driving seat of this era’s business environment. Where once it was a ‘seller’s market’, today it is a ‘buyer’s market’. At the same time, the prevailing marketing philosophy has changed from the idea of mass markets serviced by mass production to the idea of ‘markets-of-one’ serviced by mass customization. Even though this shift has been observable for some time, it has not reflected in such needy of thinking about supply chain design. The traditional supply chain business model which we knew from times was based around maximizing efficiencies, through the exploitation of the ‘economies of scale’. So, at that time, factories were designed to produce things in large volumes and to maximize the use of capacity. This business model worked well in the conditions for which it was designed, e.g. the production of standard products designed for mass markets.
The problem now is that the context has changed. We have seen a move from the traditional supply chain to a supply chain where customer is the leader giving orders of the type of products or even the type of supply chain to be followed, and yet even