Can we collectively have the genius to remove complexity from global material flow?

By Benoit Montreuil, President 2008-2009
College Industry Council on Material Handling Education

A friend of mine recently brought to my attention a thought by Alan Perlis, the computer scientist who won the first prestigious Turing Award: ‘Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.’
  
At the same time, my work with College Industry Council on Material Handling Education (CICMHE) has led me to spend time considering the history and present of materials handling, logistics and supply chains, and pondering about their future evolution. The connection with Perlis’s thought came loud and clear in my mind, as it expresses many of the challenges, compromises and decisions our community is facing.
  
One can state that we all live in a society and work in an economy that are both becoming ever more complex, or whose inherently rich complexity we perceive and exploit ever more.
  
For example, globalization opens access to customers and partners from all around the world. Yet at the same time it forces us to face fierce competition and to deal openly with issues such as changing demographics, equitability, ethics, environment and sustainability.
  
Similarly, digitalization opens so many new avenues for imagining how we can solve our clients’ problems and can reinvent our businesses and industries, yet at the same time it increases drastically the complexity of designing, making and sustaining the solutions offered to clients.
  
Overall, businesses are pressured to be concurrently more demand driven, customer centric, lean, agile, productive, resilient, innovative, as well as better employers and world citizens, in an ever more competitive and turbulent environment. Welcome to complexity.
  
Decades ago, material handling was about forklifts, conveyors, containers, racks, and so on. Consider today’s addition to the Material Handling Industry of America (MHIA) makeup of Industry Groups: Automated Storage/Retrieval Systems, Automated Guided Vehicle Systems, Integrated Systems and Controls, Order Fulfillment, and Supply Chain Execution Systems & Technologies. Our community is no fool: it recognizes increased complexity. Indeed many of our solutions providers, integrators, consultants, educators and researchers have learned to harness complexity and thrive on it.
  
Do we pragmatically suffer complexity? I would claim that the community is divided and some of us have divided feelings about this. First, the increase of complexity leads the industry away from commoditization which is a danger so much felt by many members of the community.
  
Second, sophisticated automated and computerized handling and logistic systems are great value sources for vendors, consultants, integrators and researchers, and help build differentiating capabilities for sophisticated users.
  
Third, many users do not have the means to afford complex handling and logistic systems, and have to make numerous compromises to survive. Fourth, many users of complex systems feel them to be cumbersome, rigid, bottlenecking, expensive to implement, operate and maintain. The first two facets do not lead to suffering complexity (to the contrary, actually) while the last two do.
  
Some members of the community avoid complexity related to material handling and logistics; mostly users and consultants. The best examples are provided by those preaching and implementing basic lean techniques. Many implementations shy away from complexity. They are willing to insert additional capacity and smooth demand so as to get away from workflow complexity. Most lean cells use very simple handling and logistic tools. More sophisticated lean implementations, aiming to sustain agile multi-model production or personalization, add complexity, yet with a keen interest in inserting it as minimally as possible to achieve the intended capabilities.
  
Geniuses remove complexity. I would add that they often sublimate it, moving it to a more manageable plane of reality. A great example is provided by the invention of the Internet, which has moved worldwide digital communication and information exchange from science fiction to a day-to-day practice for most of us.
  
In material handling and logistics, a vivid achievement in terms of complexity removal has been the rise of the container as the key for untangling intercontinental logistics, as documented by Donovan and Bonney in their book ‘The Box that Changed the World: Fifty Years of Container Shipping – An Illustrated History.’
  
There could be other candidate achievements, yet even the container paradigm switch has not yet succeeded to have pervasive penetration within facilities or in smaller size transportation. Most handling, storage and transportation is still stuck with the huge complexity of dealing with general merchandises or a myriad of unit loads, instead of standardized modular containers designed for ease of handling and transportation.
  
Even though MHIA has an industry group for returnable containers, we are still far from the equivalent of the world standardized shipping container. In 1993, I voiced this move toward modular transportation and handling, with very limited success.
  
I am making a stand here that the greatest achievement yet to be made in handling, logistics and transportation is really to enable easy, open and efficient access to, deployment of, and interaction with objects throughout the world, the same way the Internet has done for information and communication. Yes, many industries and enterprises have suffered from the rise of the Internet, many died, and others had to reinvent themselves. Yet so many new businesses, previously unimaginable, have sprouted from it.
  
All computer users, both people and organizations, have also had to switch to the new paradigm. In our domain, a first step has been advocated through the introduction of the concept of ‘Internet of Things,’ equipping all handled objects with RFID and sensors, and connecting them to the Web, enabling the tracking and control of material flow in a distributed manner (www.itu.int/intenetofthings).
  
The concept is but a small step toward the challenge I stated above, since it touches only minimally the nature of physical infrastructures and equipment. Will we have the collective genius of realizing for materials what has been achieved for the digital world? I do hope so and I am volunteering engagement if the community is willing to explore such a quest for conquering global material flow complexity. 

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