What are currently the biggest challenges when you take a look behind the doors of the German logistics and production industry?
This is exactly the question we asked Prof. Dr. Johannes Fottner, University Professor of Technical Logistics at the TU Munich, in the first part of our exclusive interview.
Maurice Brodhun: "Prof. Dr. Fottner, in your opinion, what are currently the three biggest challenges in production and logistics?"
Prof. Dr. Fottner: "The three biggest challenges are of course mostly man-made and they start with the fact that we live in a very individualized world today. We are always told that it is the market that demands this - but I can say that it is very often the manufacturers who represent individualization in the sense of an enormously high number of variants of articles and at the same time a high variety of articles per se, and that is of course a real problem logistically both in production and in distribution with short delivery times.
Then we have something else: This is something that nature has given us, but which we have also increased independently, namely the volatility that we have in the market, especially in terms of market demand. And you can say that there are two times today when almost everyone who has anything to do with e-commerce or retail is always completely overwhelmed. The first is the man-made Black Friday phenomenon. Unfortunately, the second part is also man-made: the Christmas business. We simply have enormous power peaks and we have to ensure that we can still handle them without ensuring that our systems are all completely underutilized for the rest of the year.
And this brings us to the third challenge, which is almost a solution to the first two: we are currently changing the business models for application usage and technology to a comparatively large extent towards pay-per-use, X-as-a-service, everything becomes a service - whether this can always be implemented so well from a business point of view - but it is at least increasing and can of course also help us to cushion this volatility a little."
