Tag: 5G

OM in the News: 5G Promises Radical Overhaul for Supply Chains

The rollout of 5G, reports The Wall Street Journal (April 12, 2020) has the potential to transform the supply chain— helping companies more precisely measure consumer demand, cut waste and react in real time as situations change. 

Supply and demand. Part of the problem with modern supply chains is that, often, businesses and their suppliers have only a vague idea of where goods are at any one point in time, what condition they are in and whether they are even needed at their destination. There are limits in current 4G networks to how many sensors, cameras and other internet-connected devices can be supported at any one time. The enhanced bandwidth and stability that 5G offers will enable far more devices to be live on a single connection. This new level of analytical capability will help solve one of the toughest challenges for supply-chain management: figuring out how much of something people want at any particular moment.

Food waste. Although 820 million people around the world are undernourished, up to 30% of all food is lost or wasted. Oversupply in grocery stores is a major source of overall waste. 5G can help, for example, by enabling real-time data transmissions to monitor failures in refrigerated containers. 5G will also allow for greater route optimization, taking into account traffic and other information. Businesses will incur fewer oversupplies of goods, reducing their impact on the environment by producing less waste and requiring fewer deliveries.

Infrastructure overhaul. A more immediate benefit for supply-chain specialists will be the ability for wireless 5G to sidestep aging infrastructure that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to replace. For example, the ability for all of the thousands of pharmacies across the U.S. to exchange data in real time isn’t currently possible using the existing infrastructure. 5G will have a tremendous effect on getting prescriptions to patients in a timely fashion and improving customer experiences.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What is the difference between 4G and 5G?
  2. Summarize the SCM advantages of 5G.

OM in the News: Protecting the Global Supply Chain

Through government investments and subsidies, as well as intellectual property theft of companies like Idaho’s Micron, China has tried to dominate the $1.5 trillion electronics industry, reports Material Handling & Logistics (July 31, 2019). This, according to the U.S., creates serious, far-reaching threats to the supply chains that support the U.S. government and military. The MICROCHIPS Act, introduced July 30 in the U.S. Senate, creates a “coordinated approach to identify and prevent these efforts and others aimed at undermining or interrupting the timely and secure provision of dual-use technologies vital to national security.”

Chinese companies, according to Senator Mark Warner, which export telecommunication technology equipment into software, hardware, and services used in the U.S., hope to export 5th-generation technology (5G) to the U.S. that could potentially harm and expose both consumer and U.S. military information. “While there is broad recognition of the threats to our supply chain posed by China, we still lack a coordinated strategy to defend ourselves,” said Warner. “As a result, U.S. companies lose billions of dollars to intellectual property theft every year, and counterfeit and compromised electronics in U.S. military, government and critical civilian platforms give China potential backdoors to compromise these systems. We need a national strategy to unify efforts across the government to protect our supply chain and our national security.”

The MICROCHIPS Act addresses China’s practice of four major areas of electronic warfare, including supply chain exploitation through supplying faulty software hardware and components; cyber-physical attacks on U.S. systems; cyber-attacks on computer systems; and bad actors gaining sensitive information.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What is the purpose of the MICROCHIPS Act?
  2. What supply chains is the Senate most concerned with?