The Road From Chaos And The Road To Hana

Actually, there are many roads out of Chaos and surrounding villages, which include Confusion and Consternation.  The one that leads to Conformance, aka the shining city on the hill, is called Collaboration.  It is full of twists, turns, and surprises, and takes longer than anyone might imagine to reach its destination.  Two cases quickly come to mind.

One is the 'umble wood pallet, a staple in any distribution center and indispensable for moving products on a more-than-one-at-a-time basis.  Fifty years ago there were no particular universal standards for pallet size and construction.  A food company pioneered the development of a "standard" pallet, which later became known as the GMA pallet.  48"x40", it is today the dominant pallet size in North America, and correlates closely with the 1.2mx1m European pallet.  (There are still other sizes surviving, notably the 42" pallet used in the telecommunications industry.)

The struggle to achieve this relative uniformity across a spectrum of companies and supply chains was tough, and initial resistance to the notion delayed serious collaborative development for several years.

More recently, the marine cargo container ("shipping container"), which has made efficient global supply chain execution possible, and piles of which crowd freight yards and intermodal terminals across the country, has undergone a remarkable journey to get from Chaos to Conformance.  The painful birth and development of the "standard" shipping container is detailed in the soporific, but vitally important book, The Box, by Marc Levinson.

The basic concept originated in 1953, with the first container shipment going from Newark to Houston in 1956.  But, the multiplicity of container sizes (and backers) threatened to shut down the emerging trend by the late '50s.  It took until 1970 for ISO to publish the first complete draft of its standards.  Although considerable progress was being made while standards were still in development, there were still holdouts involving two major shipping lines in the late '60s.

The lesson here is that the relationships required to successfully navigate from Chaos to Conformance can be incredibly more complex, sensitive, and fragile than those involving supply chain partners, or even an end-to-end set of supply chain collaborators.  They tend to be transient, but intense.  They necessarily include governments and labor unions, and they often have international ramifications - and participation.

Many of the participants in the debate and resolution play roles that transcend the usual picture of supply chain relationships, such as seaports, railroads, air cargo carriers, and airports.  Further, the operating entities involved may be bitter competitors in all other aspects of supply chain execution, suspicious of one another, as well as skeptical about new thinking.

In summary, the Collaboration Road from Chaos to Conformance may be a bit like Maui's Road to Hana.  Difficult, and on some days seemingly impossible, full of pitfalls and opportunities to crash, but in the end, the only way to drive there.

What do you think?  Do you have other examples?   Does bar coding look like a candidate from the past?  And, has RFID been on this road?