In my recent conversation with René Schrama, Chief Commercial Officer at Peak Technologies, we explored a theme that’s been echoing louder in every boardroom, warehouse, and logistics hub: digitising workflows and leveraging automation, intelligently, are no longer mere tweaks to the system. They’re essential for fortifying supply chain resilience and embedding sustainability deep into the DNA of modern operations.
René’s insights were a timely reminder that, even as global trade wars flare and the climate clock ticks faster, the real battleground for competitive advantage lies in how quickly and cleverly businesses can adapt. The key? Moving beyond blunt-force automation, those monolithic, high-stakes “rip and replace” solutions, and embracing a more nuanced, incremental, and purpose-driven approach.
The State of Play: Why Resilience and Sustainability Are Non-Negotiable
Let’s face it: supply chains are under siege. From the Suez Canal blockages and Red Sea tensions to shifting tariffs and climate shocks, the past five years have obliterated any illusions of stability. According to the World Economic Forum, supply chain disruptions now gobble up to 6% of annual revenues worldwide. The cost of not being resilient is staggering.
Yet resilience isn’t just about surviving the next tariff tweak or political meltdown. It’s about redesigning systems to withstand shocks while operating sustainably. The UN’s 2024 Global Resources Outlook was unequivocal: our consumption of materials has tripled in the past 50 years and is set to double again by 2060 if we don’t change course. Meanwhile, Scope 3 emissions (the ones hiding in the nooks of supply chains) account for over 70% of corporate carbon footprints.
These twin imperatives, resilience and sustainability, aren’t separate goals. They’re two sides of the same coin. And digitisation and automation are the mint that forges it.
Digitising Workflows: The Backbone of Agility
Digitisation isn’t just about slapping sensors on forklifts or slinging fancy dashboards on the wall. It’s about capturing data at every node of the supply chain, turning it into actionable insights, and feeding that back into decision-making in real time.
Take real-time visibility, for instance. A 2024 Gartner report highlighted that 75% of companies that invested in real-time supply chain visibility platforms in the past three years have seen improved performance during disruptions. The power of knowing right now where your goods are, what condition they’re in, and how external shocks might reroute your plans cannot be overstated.
But digitisation also means eliminating paper-based workflows that slow things down, digitising manual inputs, and connecting fragmented systems into a unified, dynamic platform. In our chat, René mentioned Peak’s heritage in barcoding, once the bleeding edge of data capture, now the baseline. Today, it’s about weaving in RFID, IoT sensors, AI-driven analytics, and machine learning for predictive insights.
Intelligent Automation: Beyond the Big Bang
Here’s where René’s perspective really lit up for me: the myth that automation must be a massive, disruptive project. Too often, leaders envision factory floors overrun by whirring robots or fleets of autonomous trucks, forgetting that most operations still have to run tomorrow morning.
In reality, intelligent automation is about surgical precision. It’s about pinpointing the six-second wins, the incremental gains that, when scaled across thousands of transactions, add up to game-changing improvements.
This Kaizen-like approach to automation – where continuous improvement meets digital transformation resonates deeply. Consider a third-party logistics firm’s forklift operation: shaving six seconds off a repetitive task might not seem like much until you multiply it across hundreds of forklifts, thousands of shifts, and millions of parcels. Those seconds become hours, days, even months of capacity reclaimed. And in an industry where margins are razor-thin, that’s gold dust.
Greenfield vs. Brownfield: Tailoring the Approach
One of the insights from René that stuck with me is how the starting point shapes the journey. A Greenfield site, an entirely new operation, can be designed from scratch with automation baked in at every level. But most supply chains are brownfield: legacy facilities, existing investments, human factors that can’t be bulldozed overnight.
This calls for intelligent compromise. Retrofitting automation into brownfield sites means layering in digital tools where they have the highest impact, without causing downstream chaos. It’s about selectively automating the pockets of your operation that offer the biggest return on investment while ensuring the rest of the system still functions smoothly.
Sustainability as Strategy, Not Sideshow
Here’s the heart of the matter: digitising workflows and intelligent automation are not just about cost savings or shiny tech. They’re critical to sustainability.
The European Green Deal and the Circular Economy Action Plan have put circularity front and centre, pushing businesses to design out waste and keep materials in play longer. René noted how this shift is driving companies to rethink reverse logistics, not just as an afterthought, but as a core capability to re-harvest precious resources like rare earths and metals from e-waste.
The UN’s Global E-Waste Monitor 2024 underscores this urgency: 62 million tonnes of e-waste generated worldwide last year, with only 20% officially recycled. That’s a colossal pile of opportunity, if we’re clever enough to digitise those reverse flows and automate the capture and processing of valuable materials.
The Labour Puzzle: Automation as a Partner, Not a Predator
Automation has long been painted as the bogeyman of job losses. But as René pointed out, that’s a narrative that misses the bigger picture. In developed economies, birth rates are falling below replacement levels, workforces are ageing, and protectionism is limiting labour mobility.
The result? A structural shortage of workers, particularly in the physically demanding, repetitive roles that automation is tailor-made to fill. Rather than replacing workers wholesale, automation can ease labour shortages, upskill the workforce, and reallocate human energy to higher-value, more creative tasks.
Japan’s approach to robotics in elder care and logistics is a prime example. Far from putting people out of work, it’s helping close the gap where there simply aren’t enough people to do the job.
Collaboration and Data Sharing: The Next Frontier
Automation doesn’t thrive in a vacuum. Supply chains are ecosystems, and ecosystems thrive on collaboration. René’s wish for more open systems from startups, so they can plug into the existing operational fabric of their customers, hits the nail on the head.
The World Economic Forum’s 2023 report “Shared Intelligence for Resilient Supply Systems” [PDF] puts it bluntly: integrated, transparent data sharing across supply chain partners can cut response times to disruptions by 25% and reduce carbon emissions by up to 30% through smarter routing and inventory management.
But that means breaking down silos, agreeing on what data is strategic and what can be shared, and building trust-based relationships across the ecosystem.
Metrics that Matter: ROI, Sustainability, and Beyond
As René put it, the right KPIs depend on the project. Shaving seconds off a forklift driver’s workflow? That’s about throughput and capacity. Digitising reverse logistics? It’s about resource recovery and circularity. But underpinning it all is the business case: the ROI of getting smarter, faster, and cleaner.
The best metrics don’t just track inputs or outputs, they connect process improvement to broader strategic outcomes: lower emissions, reduced waste, more resilient customer commitments.
My Takeaway: Incremental Wins, Exponential Gains
If there’s one lesson I’m taking away from my conversation with René, and from the broader state of play, it’s that the future of supply chain sustainability won’t be built in a day. It’ll be built one incremental improvement at a time, stitched together into a tapestry of resilience and circularity.
Digitising workflows and automating intelligently isn’t just an operational tactic. It’s a mindset shift: from reactive to proactive, from local to systemic, from extractive to regenerative.
A Final Thought and an Invitation
The path forward is neither easy nor certain, but it’s clear: the supply chains that thrive will be those that see digitisation and automation not as burdens, but as bridges—to a more resilient, more sustainable world.
If you’d like to hear more of René’s insights on this crucial topic, I encourage you to listen to the full episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast here: Six-Second Wins: Designing Waste Out of Supply Chains with Intelligent Automation. And if you’re hungry for more insights from supply chain leaders around the globe, there are many more episodes waiting for you there.
Let’s keep the conversation going because the future of supply chains is being written right now, in the six-second wins that add up to the breakthroughs we’ll need tomorrow.
Photo credit Brick Broadcasting on Flickr