The year was 1894, and London had been dealing with the "Great Manure Crisis" for years, and the Times had predicted that every street would be buried under nine feet of manure. Urban planners needed help with what to do about the situation. New technologies in the form of motorized vehicles started to make a difference. Introduced on a massive scale, they allowed for easier transportation of goods and people throughout the city and reduced waste accumulation in public areas. Still uncertain about how this new technology would affect their society, urban planners decided to give it a chance and began introducing motorized vehicles into the city streets little by little until, eventually, enough cars were running around that the Great Manure Crisis finally came to an end in 1912. Little did anyone know then that this invention would continue to shape our world for centuries more to come — from Charles Lindbergh's first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 up until...
In a world faced with the prospect of tightening supplies, higher energy costs heightened geopolitical risk, and strained transportation networks, advanced supply chain technologies will become mission-critical for many more companies. The supply chain task is not an enterprise problem; it is an end-to-end network problem involving multiple enterprises. Therefore, the solution does not lie in fixing one link in the chain but in devising a community.