CSCM events in April and May

On Tuesday 12 April, the Centre held a webinar on online grocery with Timothy Laseter, Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School. Tim shared his experience and research covering the history as well as the emerging trends in online grocery and the infamous last mile.

Tim started with the history of online grocery in the US, from the rise and fall of Webvan to the booming success of Instacart. He then continued with the immense impact of the pandemic on grocery habits and how it increased the popularity of online grocery shopping.

Explaining the tradeoffs of costs, speed, and variety in online shopping, Tim presented surveys that showed that price is the most important factor for the customers in online grocery. The cost-to-serve element can be broken into operating costs, cost of pick and pack, and cost of last mile.

Finally, Tim introduced new technologies that could hugely decrease these costs, such as micro fulfillment or refrigerated boxes. The one and only way to survive in today’s dynamic economy is to continuously improve and adapt to the ever-changing competitive environment.

In our other webinar, on Thursday 3 May, we had Thomas Choi, AT&T Professor of the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, talking about supply chain financing (SCF).

Thomas started with the definition of SCF, which is using the supply chain to fund the organization and using the organization to fund the supply chain. Thomas then explained the role of fintechs and how large corporations have implemented SCF through reverse factoring and dynamic discounting with their help.

He then continued how small to medium sized (SME) suppliers that operate in the long tail of the supply chain have largely been left out of such SCF initiatives. Fintechs working with large buying companies now offer ways for SME suppliers to get paid earlier. The distributed ledger technology helps in this regard and this approach is often called deep-tier financing (DTF).