Next Campus pays tribute to the unsung heroes

By Dusty Alahakoon

If COVID-19 taught us one thing, it taught us that logistics play a fundamental role in our day-to-day lives. During the first few weeks of the first lockdown in March 2020, life as we knew it, was thrown into chaos, and in spite of having a larger number of supermarkets, even those in Colombo, leave aside the rest of Sri Lanka, people struggled to get their hands on bare necessities.

Nearly 18 months on, as a nation we now no longer panic at the words ‘lockdown’ or ‘travel restrictions’ and we owe this sense of security and relative ‘normalcy’ to the supply chain and logistics professionals in Sri Lanka; the unsung heroes of the pandemic.

One of the inevitable questions we will now need to ask is: what will the ‘new normal’ look like? And, how does the logistics industry of Sri Lanka adapt itself and change to these new circumstances? Not every country will respond in the same way and there will be no way of determining how long any period of restrictions might last or what form they might take. ‘Flexibility and resilience’ will be the watch words moving forward, and the ability to deliver solutions to match the customer’s changed needs, will be key.

The original use of the word ‘logistics’ was derived from its original use in the French military; a term used to refer to how military personnel obtained, stored and moved equipment and supplies. Today, the use of the word is much wider and covers all aspects of the flow of goods between point of origin and point of consumption; and along the supply chain.

The management of logistics is about having the right resources in place at the right time to get the goods delivered to the right location in the correct condition. It sounds simple enough but with ever more complex, longer supply chains around the world it only takes one part of the world to sneeze and your entire supply chain can catch a cold!

Whatever the new normal is, logistics will still play a key role in how the world and we in Sri Lanka, recovers from the brinks of economic collapse. The previously perfected, just-in-time supply chain formats encountered many failings when you add in a global pandemic into the mix, a situation where no nation remains untouched to date. This may well result in a reformatting and readjusting of the entire logistics industry as we enter the new normal.  But whatever the new normal is, logistics will still play a key role in how the world recovers from a time of planetary economic collapse. E-Commerce is likely to continue to expand across the world and as McKinsey points out in its 2020 report on how consumer goods companies are preparing for the new normal: “In the medium term, we expect shoppers to prefer the ‘safe’ experience of shopping online to the prospect of shopping in crowded stores.”

Embracing the best digital technology has also increased customer expectation of what can be delivered.  The responsibility is on the logistics provider to deliver a service to a retail partner which matches up to these customer demands. Digital workforce tools, the use of robots in warehouses, advanced analytics and warehouse management all combine to make meeting those demands a reality, while at the same time maintaining firm control over operational costs and efficiencies. In simple terms businesses need logistics providers to help provide them with a competitive edge over other companies across inbound, outbound and reverse logistics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the important role logistics plays in how the modern world functions. We have all become even more aware of just how important our skills and capabilities are. 

Next Campus started bringing focus to the logistics and supply chain industry in Sri Lanka, back in 2013 with the first-ever Colombo Supply Chain Forum jointly presented with Accenture Global. Driving logistics and supply chain education and skill building even further, in 2016 Next Campus offered Sri Lanka’s first MSc in Logistics and Supply Chain Management in collaboration with Birmingham City University; with a course content that was ahead of times, over the last five years Next Campus has produced over 250 logistics and supply chain professionals in Sri Lanka, who are currently working in leadership positions in the industry.

Technology in Logistics and Supply Chain were a key area of the curriculum, and we are extremely proud of our alumni who have stood strong, with the resilience to overcome the most challenging of circumstances.

We at Next Campus stand alongside with both the Government of Sri Lanka and the Logistics and Supply Chain industries in a vision to see Sri Lanka being regional logistics hub. We Next, however, believe that we do not have the time or luxury of growing through experience, trial and error, but we need to grow through learning from the first world and adapting the best practices within a short span of time. This has now led us to introduce MSc in Digital Transformation which will focus on the skill set required to lead the accelerated digitisation that has become a necessity today.

(The writer is Chairman, Next Campus.)