2016 - The Future Value Chain

The speed of change and a sense of urgency will drive the evolution of the value chain over the next decade. Is the consumer products and retail industry ready? The new study, from the Global Commerce Initiative (GCI), Capgemini and Intel, defines a unique vision of the total value chain for consumer goods from manufacture to consumption.

Industry Leaders Collaborate on Ten-Year Vision

The report, titled “2016: The Future Value Chain,” predicts that the evolution of the value chain will be driven increasingly by a convergence of external forces that can only be addressed collaboratively by the members of the value chain. Traditional industry trends in information flow, logistics, consumer behavior and demographics will become increasingly affected by major issues of ecology, new technologies, the regulatory environment, and shifts in the global economy.

The study stemmed from joint work conducted by a wide range of industry players, including retailers, consumer products manufacturers, logistics service providers, academics and technology companies. Participating organisations came from the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia and included Carrefour group, Coca-Cola, Dairy Farm, DHL, Kraft Foods, METRO Group, Nestlé, Philips, Pick ’n Pay, Procter & Gamble, Royal Ahold, Unilever, Wal-Mart, GCI, Lean Enterprise Academy, Intel and Capgemini.

The report calls on the industry to address three interrelated challenges.

1. At the core is the development of new ways of working together, including sustainable changes in culture, collaborative business planning and new measures and rewards.

2. By building collaborative cultures companies lay the foundation for sharing information more readily: The report emphasizes that “the best way to manage increasing complexity is through transparency.”

3. The study concludes that it is only in an open, collaborative environment that industry can redefine the future value chain and effectively address the impact on the physical flow of goods of changing energy costs, shifts in population density and other external forces.

The study’s working group was co-chaired by Peter Jordan, Director International B2B Strategy, Kraft Foods, and by Ruud van der Pluijm, Vice President B2B eCommerce, Royal Ahold. “We are faced with the challenge of thinking of our business as part of an increasingly integrated value chain while maintaining the essential commercial principles of fierce competition,” said Peter Jordan.

“We can only do this by changing our cultures internally and rethinking the sustainability of the relationships that bind us,” added Ruud van der Pluijm. “This will affect the development of our organizations and the rewards we use to identify new measures of performance. At the heart of the vision for 2016 is a fundamental principle of collaborative commercial trust.”