A vision that France Supply Chain shares, and to which we must add a strong human dimension. An article will be dedicated to the conference #SITL24 - Metamorphoses with them: the voices of change. To achieve our mission and ambitions, we published a "Manifesto for a Frugal and Desirable Supply Chain" at the end of 2023, packed with hundreds of inspiring solutions and initiatives.

At the 50 Nuances de Risques conference hosted by our partner Wavestone, co-leaders from the risk community accompanied by Luca Silippo, chief economist and strategy analyst at Geodis (find the replay of his keynote at our 2023 European Congress at the end of this article) and Guillaume Walline from Prewave shared their expertise.

Managing risk in the supply chain is strategic, and the speakers gave us examples from their own practice:

Warehouses have a bad reputation and are the focus of much debate, yet they account for only 2% of land use in France. Their location is strategic for territories, both economically (job and income creation) andenvironmentally (heavy goods vehicles stay out of towns, solar energy hub, water reserve via rainwater recovery and reduction of transport-related GHG emissions).

At the Warehouse location: a strategic choice for territories conference, speakers called on public authorities to think collectively and intelligently, and to include all stakeholders in future location projects or new legislation (referring to the Zero Artificialization Law).

We held another landmark conference: E.VO.L.U.E: les premiers résultats concrets pour une Logistique Urbaine Plus Efficiente. We launched this project alongside Club Déméter and the Institut du Commerce, in response to the major challenges facing urban logistics, namely the massification of flows and the need for sustainability. We'll come back to this in a separate article.

Linear supply chains, although optimized, are reaching the limits of our resources. There are many other ways of integrating circularity into our organizational models and adopting more virtuous consumer behavior. We'll be exploring them in the^2nd workshop dedicated to the circular supply chain.

To open the^2nd day of the show, Olivier Babeau, founder of the Sapiens Institute, took to the SITL stage to talk about the future in terms of the past and the history of major innovations.

"The history of mankind is the history of acceleration", so how can we adapt to such rapid change? These days, the brain is the number 1 asset, which leads to a polarization of power in favor of those who own the technology (as evidenced by the stock market listing of NVidia, Apple or Microsoft). Then came AI.

"We were not prepared for the merging of capital and labor", but now whoever has the best AI has the power, because it improves performance, quality and reduces costs. Note that what we call AI today is intelligence in the American sense of the word (intelligence as the processing of data). The exponential evolution of AI is leading us towards a very near future in which intelligence will become a "commodity", a future in which AI will surpass us.

In conclusion, SITL 2024 offered an enlightening vision of the future of logistics and the supply chain. Discussions highlighted the need for profound transformation, from increased collaboration to risk management and the adoption of innovative technologies such as AI. While addressing crucial issues such as sustainability and circularity, the show highlighted the crucial role of the human in this evolving landscape, calling for a harmonious hybridization between man and machine, placing the emphasis on continuous learning and the development of interpersonal skills.