Brief history of ICT in supply chains (1990s)

JOS VAN HILLEGERSBERG: It’s very hard to imagine supply chains today without internet. Internet is not that classic. It really started in the 1990s. We know the technologies that built up the internet– the links, the web pages, the internet protocols. They were invented in the 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee. And at that time it was maybe hard to imagine how big the impact on supply chains would be. Today a lot of communication between companies in the supply chain is facilitated by the web. Unfortunately, the internet has also become a less safe place. The first internet virus was introduced in 1992. And today, when supply chains are handled over the web, security has to be put in place. Because there are threats everywhere.

A lot of companies now use e-commerce as a store front to the end consumer or in the business-to-business communications. The first website that did this is only from 1994. It’s generally recognised that Pizza Hut did the first sale on the internet– a pizza, of course. Today we cannot imagine that any business takes place without these internet channels. And it’s even the case that the internet companies– like Amazon, which was founded in only in 1995– are now generally seen as pioneers in supply chain management. The reason for this instead that they learned how to use these online channels in learning about the consumer and learning about demand patterns, making forecasts from the behaviour that their consumers have on their website.

So it’s really interesting to see these companies that are relatively new in the supply chain space use technology to be now one of the key innovators in supply chain. So in a nutshell, I try to cover many essential innovations from IT that happened– let’s say between the 1970s and the 1990s. And you can see how many really very important technologies were introduced in that time that have changed the landscape of supply chains completely. You’ll see many of these technologies around today, and even being introduced. So it’s not that all of this is complete history.

And that’s why it’s important, as a supply chain manager, to know where we come from and to know how we are continuously innovating supply chains with these technologies, but also with much newer technologies that are introduced today. So supply chain is a fascinating area, where the technologies are used and applied to make the supplies chain more effective and more sustainable.