Recession and Supply Chain

This is my first public blog. I have written many corporate blogs at IBM.

Recently, I did an interview for LogiPi.com, a e-Journal for Supply Chain Professionals.

I was asked questions like:
1. How do you think the recession has changed the future of supply chain management?
2. How has recession affected me?
3. Has the recession helped or harmed innovation?

You can read my interview here.

After the interview, I was motivated to write about how recession, looking at it as a business condition, has come to aid technology growth in the supply chain industry.

When I was studying Master in Computer Science at SUNY Albany, NY, my first job was at CommerceHub.com. Its a B2B solutions provider. I was a software engineer there for 6 months, in 1999. B2B was a big thing back in 1999. Many thought that there would be exponential growth in B2B services because of the IT boom that we had seen in 1999. However, business conditions went sour very quickly after the 'dot com' crash at the end of '99. I left the job to take up being a teaching assistant of data structures and algorithms.

There was something I learnt from my brief exposure to B2B supply chain, which is that the true potential of B2B had not been realized before the IT industry crash.

My opinion is that we are about to see a new and renewed wave of B2B and even B2C innovation because of the current business conditions, which are affected by imminent recession.

So keep an eye out for B2B and B2C start-ups of new ventures to keep supply chain growing in US and around the world.

This is an example where business has to the aid of technology. Specifically, the dying B2B and B2C technology is seeing a spur of activities driven by business demands and conditions.