The government came up with a logistics innovation first.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. There was an interesting piece in the June issue of DC Velocity Magazine, “Micro-warehouses bring fulfillment closer to the customer.” Containerized micro warehouses? It’s a great concept, worth putting in the spotlight.

I showed the story to a Veteran who is also a logistician, and he looked me in the eye and said, "Been there, done that, got the t-shirt." 

He's right. The military did it a long time ago. Pre-loaded containers configured as a stockroom are a fantastic timesaver when you are deploying a military force and you have to hit the beach and function.  Transport the box around the world, open the door, and you have a mini-distribution center ready to go. 

These transportable distribution points ride on rail cars. They ride on trucks. They ride on combat amphibious assault ships, and on merchant marine container ships. They are air transportable. They line up nicely on the back of combat transport vehicles for mobility in a battle zone. They can be linked together to create standard 20-foot container configurations. 

The Marines call them quadcons, palcons, and joint modular intermodal containers. The Army has larger truck or rail transportable versions that can deploy, open up, and be a distribution point ready-to-go. Heck, I used to buy coffee out of a container converted to retail and storage space in Iraq. FEMA does something similar for disaster relief, with pre-configured loaded containers deployed around the country, ready to respond immediately to a disaster.

Bottom line: containers configured to service as mobile distribution points is a concept the military has long understood. The ability to deliver what is needed when it is needed, even in the most challenging situations. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Interesting times.

In March I wrote, “Relationships around the world are shifting, which means that the logistician’s world is becoming more uncertain.  Some people make money from uncertainty, but in our world we earn profits by making uncertainty go away.”

Well, things aren’t getting any better.  It's our job to make the supply chain work, to make things move, and it sure looks like the time has arrived to have the contingency plans ready.

According to the US Census Bureau’s 2016 statistics, the Top 3 trading partners of the United States are China, Canada and Mexico.  A few slots below, at Number 7, is South Korea.  The United States is involved in difficult trade discussions with all of them, and things are more than a bit unsettled.

And while trade with Japan is no longer top of mind in our collective consciousness, as it was thirty years ago, they still rank Number 4 on our list of trading partners.  With ICBM’s flying overhead launched by North Korea things feel a little bit more uncertain in Japan these days.

Let’s lump the individual European Union countries together, and we can add Top 10 trading partners the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands to the list.  There is more than a little uncertainty over just where Europe is headed as they thrash through Brexit.

The only country on the Top 10 trading partner list we haven’t talked about is Hong Kong.  As each day passes it is harder and harder to think of Hong Kong as somehow distinct from China, so I’m going to lump Hong Kong into the a bucket of radioactive uncertainty that includes Hong Kong, China, Japan, and South Korea.  A little round guy with a funny haircut named Kim Jong-un is putting them the notional shadow of a mushroom cloud and that's not good for trade.

This Top 10 look should be a disturbing perspective for any logistician.  If you are reading this it is a pretty fair bet that you, like me, are a logistician.  It’s our job to remove uncertainty, promote stability, and in general make things flow smoothly, but the world is not cooperating.  My advice is that it is time to start hedging your bets.  If you export heavily, start looking for new markets, hopefully domestic.  If you import heavily, start looking for domestic sources.  And start dual sourcing everything. 

As I said in the March article, “We can deal with uncertainty, but are we descending into chaos or simply witnessing a global realignment?  Either way, it’s going to be interesting.”  We may have passed simply interesting a few stops back.  “May you live in interesting times” is a proverbial Chinese curse.  Logisticians are now living through some very interesting times – getting more interesting by the day - and it surely feels like a curse.