In October last year we highlighted “A great success of the Academic & Business Partnership 2018 SCM 4 ECR Conference” with the theme “Future Leadership and Artificial Intelligence Drive Value Networks” (https://www.crd-aida.ro/2018/10/a-great-success-of-the-academic-business-partnership-2018-scm-4-ecr-conference/ ), this wonderful Conference being chaired by Professor Virgil Popa and co-hosted by Ruediger Hagedorn, Director, End-to-End Value Chain, The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF – the Global Network Serving Shopper & Consumer Needs). We showed how Ruediger Hagedorn reconfirmed from the very beginning that strategic design thinking is the next competitive advantage.

At the end of June this year took place the significant meeting for Global Logistics Experts (involved in discussions about the strategic implications of new technologies for retail and manufacturer companies) – “SpringBoard Workshop, The Consumer Goods Forum, End-to-End Value Chain, Barcelona, 25th-26th June 2019, Transportation” – to discuss key topics (such as: waiting times, flexibility and responsiveness requirements, global supply network organization, empty miles, last mile to retail, and other urgent topics), as shown in the Event Program. This off-site event of CGF, held at Ailaic (a versatile space) in the heart of Barcelona (Eixample district), allowed the experts (Ajinomoto, Danone, GS1 Spain, Jeronimo Martins, L’Oréal, Logifruit, Metro Group, Migros Switzerland, Nagel-Group, Nestlé, Oliver Wyman, PepsiCo, RuBehCon, SPAR International, The Consumer Goods Forum, University of Târgoviște – as confirmed by the final report entitled “Summer Solstice SpringBoard”, The Consumer Goods Forum | End-To-End Value Chain, Executive Summary, Barcelona, Spain) to approach the most pertinent main themes (Workgroup 1: Efficiency and Sustainability; Workgroup 2: Logistics in Smarter Cities; Workgroup 3: Technology; Workgroup 4: On-Time and In-Full/OTIF) and to outline the outcomes of the workgroup discussions (Challenges, Potential solutions, Collaborative approach, Next steps for E2E).

Professor Virgil Popa was one of the experts who participated at this successful interactive workshop. This significant collaboration will continue through specific actions and follow-up physical meetings are intended to be planned (by the E2E Value Chain team) in November 2019 in Norway and in June 2020 in Switzerland.