Dominic Wilson, co-founder and managing partner of Pi Labs, on how technology will help prevent logistical nightmares.
First the chicken, now the gravy too: back when KFC and DHL announced their new logistics partnership it was billed as “groundbreaking” and “revolutionary”, but the past few weeks have shown it’s been anything but.
This is hardly the first time a global brand has suffered a major logistics meltdown, but in the wake of this year’s #KFCCrisis it’s worth adopting a birds’ eye view for a moment: what went wrong, and could technological innovation in the logistics sector prevent it from happening again?
Warehousing: the main culprit
DHL relies on one warehouse in Rugby to process KFC’s supplies. It’s based in Rugby for a reason: the town is at the heart of the ‘distribution golden triangle’, an area of the UK that is equidistant from all major ports and delivery hubs in the country. This setup might make processing more efficient for DHL, however it also creates a dangerous single point of failure: if something goes wrong with that one warehouse, the entire supply chain is disrupted, as we have seen....