I confess that I like reading research papers. It is an excellent way to stay up to date on the profession and also a good way to understand what is a fashionable trend (i.e. flavor of the day) vs. what is a trend toward progress. I always liked to read copiously, but it wasn’t until I started working on a doctoral degree that I learned how to read efficiently in order to achieve a research goal.
When an interesting research topic comes to mind, I usually start by searching for literature in Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/), which many people surprisingly don’t know it exists. But I digress.
I have been reading, off and on, for years about unique item management. This goes back to my brief time as a civil service employee in 2007 where I ended up working on a project that would have required individual parts in a submarine to be managed at the item level in order to enable remote management.
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| The Unique Logistics at Ikea |
At the time, one of the striking things that I found as I was researching the topic of managing items by unique identifier rather than by catalog identifier was how much of the research was coming from Finland and Norway.
It turns out that Scandinavia is a hotbed of logistics innovation for some reason. One of my go-to papers when I need to introduce someone to the possibilities is titled “Intelligent Products: a Survey” (Meyer, Gerben G., Kary Främling, and Jan Holmström. “Intelligent products: A survey.” Computers in industry 60.3 (2009): 137-148). I highly recommend it and, if you like it, I also recommend that you follow Holmström’s work.
Back in 2007-2008, when I was working on that project, the idea was thought to be so far out that it wasn’t even given the same level of respect as magic and was only discussed in hushed tones in very small groups. So, 8 years later, most of my appliances, and even my doorbell and light bulbs are on the internet. People have actually accepted this technology quite easily, by the way – much more so than the logistics community.
I have a love-hate relationship with research from the Gartner Group, mostly because I usually have to pay for it and I am too cheap. However, many years ago, when working on my Master’s thesis, I read a research report titled “Data in its Place” in System Software Architectures Doc. No. R-401-107. It introduced me to the concept of the “Distributed Data Paradox”. To put it in my own words, it means that there exists a tug of war between business functionality and technology, as information throughput improves with advances in technology. The paper goes on to suggest that researchers and practitioners need to understand when sufficient technological advancement has taken place to prompt a “reconceptualization” of a business function.
So perhaps this is the right time to consider the idea of unique item management instead of stock keeping unit (SKU) management, particularly in DoD logistics. It may not fit the bill in every case, but I believe it is worth exploring.