Unless you work in the technology service sector, I doubt you will have heard of ByBox. So, it may come as a surprise to hear that switching off our service for a few days would wreak havoc across the UK. Medical devices would falter, wi-fi would fail, traffic lights would be on the blink, ticket machines would jam, lifts would be stuck, trains would be late and things, in general, would be in a mess. This isn’t because we are directly responsible for keeping all these things running; it is because ByBox is the supply chain backbone for the companies that maintain the infrastructure of the UK.

What may surprise you even more is that you, the consumer, are driving radical change in our sector. You are forcing a series of mini-revolutions that will, ultimately, end up at your own doorstep.

Historically, pallets of parts have been moved blindly through distribution networks. Swap the pallets for pixels and great
things happen

Tech addiction
Over the last few decades, we have become increasingly dependent on machines. Big ones, like ATMs. Small ones, like smart phones. Medium-sized ones, like satellite dishes. Like any dependency, the mere thought of being without it for an hour or more leaves us cold. We have all experienced the fury of ‘no service’ on our mobile phones, when the very same spot had 4G the day before. We are just as irate about malfunctions in lower-tech devices, like the cappuccino machine in our favourite coffee shop or the petrol pump on our local forecourt. And we have all become incredibly impatient about the time it takes for these things to be repaired.

But, have you ever given a thought to how these devices are fixed? Take a typical scenario: a mobile phone mast in the north of England goes down at 7pm. The engineer who will fix it lives 10 miles away. It needs to be fixed by midday the next day (because effectively we – the consumer – have demanded it). The part required to fix the mast is in a central warehouse outside London. How does the engineer get his hands on the part to complete the repair?

You can’t use a standard next-day delivery service to send the part to the engineer because he won’t be at home to receive it (he will be out fixing broken phone masts). You can’t deliver the part to the mobile phone mast, because it is in the middle of a field (and in any case, it wouldn’t arrive in time unless you opted for a very costly early-morning service). So, traditional supply chain methods don’t work – they are too slow and too expensive. The answer, which is the same answer to almost every other technology supply chain challenge in the UK, is that ByBox delivers the part in the middle of the night to a smart locker located a couple of miles from the technician’s home. He gets up in the morning, goes to the bank of lockers, removes the part and fixes the mobile phone mast. For UK technicians, ByBox is the tooth fairy for mission-critical parts.

The carbon catalyst
So, as consumers, we are all technology junkies and are utterly intolerant of downtime. Delivering critical components into lockers in the middle of the night has proved to be a great solution to maintaining the UK’s technology infrastructure (there are 20,000 ByBox lockers across the UK, with some 30 million parts delivered a year). But, for consumers, that is not enough; we always expect everything faster and cheaper. And now we are demanding a reworked technology supply chain that is markedly better for the environment (and rightly so).

As is so often the case, old thinking does not produce new solutions. If you approach supply chain problems by thinking only of distribution, you miss the point entirely. The challenge should not be viewed as how to improve the carbon performance of your delivery fleet; instead, think about how to do more with fewer vehicles in the first place.

Put another way – move the data, not the part. Establishing a dramatic improvement in inventory visibility is at the heart of next-generation supply chain methods. Historically, pallets of parts have been moved blindly through distribution networks, only to be moved somewhere else the following day. Swap the pallets for pixels and great things happen. If you see you have an unused part in a ByBox locker close to that broken mobile phone mast, then there is no need to dispatch another one. Instead, dynamically grant the technician access to the smart locker and bingo – lower inventory, fewer deliveries, lower cost, lower carbon.

Of course, this poses a difficult conundrum for traditional carriers. It seems counterintuitive to invest in software and technology so you can do less of the thing that makes you money, i.e. deliveries. At ByBox, we were never shackled by such thinking. Despite operating the largest pre-8am distribution network in the UK, we have always viewed ourselves as a tech company. Net result: we invested over £5m to build our Thinventory enterprise platform to systematically rewire the technology supply chain.

The consumer technician
In most sectors, technology gets cheaper and increasingly modular every year. This is causing more than a ripple in the technology supply chain. Think about everyday technology fixes, like a point-of-sale machine in a shop. Do you ever see an engineer turn up with a screwdriver and soldering iron to repair the broken machine on site? No, instead, he’ll swap the broken unit for a new one and send the broken one back to base to be fixed.

This is, presumably, a good thing – unless you’re a highly qualified engineer. Following a script to swap the broken unit with a new unit no longer needs the skillset and experience of a traditional engineer. Increasingly, the UK technology platform is being serviced and maintained by a growing pool of outsourced technicians. This is precisely why ByBox has acquired three technical services companies in three years. Again, if you view yourself as a technology company, then investing in your own technical capability is entirely sensible.

So, where is this heading? If the responsibility for maintaining the technology infrastructure is shifting along the supply chain, where does it end up? In many cases, it will end with you, the consumer, being increasingly involved in your own supply chain. After all, if the fix to a machine can be scripted and completed in 20 minutes, why not simply collect the part from one of our smart lockers and fix it yourself?

This is part of a growing trend for consumers to be integrated more deeply into the broader supply chain. We have seen this already with crowdsourcing. It won’t be long before the concept extends to the technology supply chain.

Click, then collect it yourself
This DIY theme is also extending beyond the technology supply chain. Inadequacies in the home delivery aspect of online shopping have triggered a surge in the popularity of click and collect systems. The solution to the age-old problem of last-mile delivery now appears simple: ask consumers to do that last mile themselves, by coming to a shop to collect the goods they ordered online. Click-and-collect has become so popular that many retailers are now being forced to charge for the service, due to the labour costs involved in operating a dedicated, staffed collection counter. This, coupled with consumers’ growing dislike for queuing at the counter, is causing more and more retailers to invest in automation through locker-based collection solutions. In the last year alone, we have installed more ByBox click and collect lockers in the US, Canada, South Africa and elsewhere than over the previous five years combined.

So, the consumer is more central to the supply chain than ever before. You do the last mile by collecting your new smartphone from a smart locker, and fix it yourself if it breaks. This is liberating for consumers, but life-threatening for companies who cling to the old-fashioned notion that they are purely B2B. Far better to abandon any notion of simple acronyms, embrace consumers as a genuine part of your supply chain, and anchor everything you do around them.