The 12th annual Supply Chain Management Research Center Spring Conference — Supply Chains 2020: Collaborating to Win in an Omni-Channel World — was held April 11 at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Enterprise Development.

About 125 attended the conference, representing more than 50 companies.  The conference focused on how supply chain players can collaborate to win in an omni-channel world.

Keynote speaker Jim Tompkins of Tompkins and Associates opened the conference by presenting the audience with his scale of six levels of supply chain excellence. Tompkins indicated the average today is 2.6, with much of the challenge being a continued focus on supply chain management as strictly a cost reduction effort instead of a driver for customer satisfaction. He said Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, are the two entrepreneurs who best exemplify how to use supply chains to successfully serve their customers.

Thompkins also told the supply chain audience to brace themselves “as I expect to see more business bankruptcies in the next years than any other two-year period of recent history.” 

A panel of leading transportation practitioners focused their comments on the final delivery.  Panelists were Scott Harkins, senior vice president Global Portfolio Marketing, FedEx Services; Nick Hobbs, president Dedicated Contract Services, J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc.; Rob Kusiciel, vice president Inbound Transportation/Global Logistics, Walmart Stores, Inc.; and the moderator, Pete Spanos, vice president Logistics, Nestlé Purina Pet Care. 

Harkins indicated that FedEx was seeing substantial increases in their small package business thanks to e-commerce. Hobbs explained to the group the strategy behind J.B. Hunt Home Delivery and the opportunities they see with “white-glove home delivery services.” The blending of traditional brick-and-mortar shopping with e-commerce expectations were illustrated in a Walmart video: “Ellie’s Sweet 16.” Kusiciel indicated Walmart and other retailers were working to win in an omni-channel world to meet Ellie’s expectations.

In the Walmart video, Ellie is about to celebrate her 16th birthday. Ellie’s mother used her PDA to prepare a birthday party for 25 with suggested ideas as she built a shopping list for her trip to the nearest Supercenter where here cell phone walked her through the shopping isles as she used it to scan in each item and ordered home delivery for the dress size not on the store shelf.  Her scanned items then became her electronic receipt as she exited the store.

Gibu Thomas, senior vice president of Walmart Mobile and Digital, shared with the audience several current examples of technology applications that will create a seamless shopping experience between e-commerce and brick-and-mortar. 

An afternoon collaboration panel composed of Brenda Hambleton, chief strategy and marketing officer at ES3; David Hughes, ITS senior business partner for Walmart at Kimberly-Clark; Stephanie Wiles, senior manager Consulting at Cognizant; and David Vehec, senior vice president at GENCO pointed out the opportunities with automation in large scale warehouses, big data, joint facility and shared trucking assets, could be utilized successfully in an omni-channel supply chain world. Each panelist then joined the audience in four breakout sessions to discuss such opportunities.

CaseStack was the industry sponsor of this year’s conference. The Supply Chain Management Research Center in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas operates with the support of an executive board of more than 35 companies.  For more information about the center and the conference, visit http://scmr.uark.edu.