And that’s a wrap!

Eurobike 2023 is over, and the five days of intensive networking left me with millions of new impressions. On the high level, I wanted to understand and proof some assumptions around current digitalisation challenges especially in procurement and supply chains. Here’s a few things I’ve learned:

1. Everyone is speaking about digitalisation across all verticals, but behind the curtains you hear that the implementation is far from done. Whether it’s procurement processes, BOM management or customer support, there is loads of room to improve and innovate.

2. Digitalisation is painful (part I). Until now, there has been the impression, that manual processes “have worked”. Sending orders by fax – has worked. Managing the Bill of Materials via Excel – has worked. Sending hundreds of emails and doing handshake agreements – has worked. But how well? And will this way of working be future proof? The answer is no. We heard a lot how difficult and painful manual processes are and how much a business suffers if there are no data insights, forcastings, or clarity on what’s happening in terms of costs, inventory, sustainability, compliance.

3. Digitalisation is painful (part II). It’s not all grim – a lot of companies have introduced new digital tools and processes in the past two years. But it was by far not as easy as you’d wish for. Changing core processes and getting people on board who have been doing what they’re doing for more than 10 or 20 years, is a feat. It takes time, patience, and a strong implementation plan.

4. There are startups and scale-ups building ideas and alliances in the industry to uncover and grow the industry vertical of digitalisation at each stage of the supply chain and customer touch points. It’s super exciting to meet up and understand how we can work together. But what’s even more interesting will be the reaction to and adoption of these solutions by the more established, maybe even more traditional (?) industry players.

To drive industrial transitions, make the industry future proof (think applying technologies such as Artificial Intelligence), and introduce data-driven sustainability measures we need to digitalise – especially in supply chain.