The larger the company, the higher the expectation that staff will be cut: close to three-quarters of the companies with annual revenues of more than €1 billion anticipate making workforce reductions because of digital trends. Employees working in transport and logistics administration functions will be affected the most. In this segment, 47 percent of the companies expect cuts. The situation is similar in the customs and shipping processing functions.

In contrast, strategic and tactical supply chain planning is becoming more important: it is the only area in which many companies are planning to increase headcount. As one respondent explains, "Many of the processes directly involved in SCM can be automated and greatly simplified. Parallel to this, strategic SCM activities will gain greater importance and play a key role in creating a competitive advantage."

No revolution, but high expectations for continued digital supply chain evolution

The study clearly shows that evolutionary changes will take place in select areas. Supply chain managers expect big benefits from continued digitalization in their supply chains. Namely, they expect greater transparency and flexibility, plus a reduction in inventories and delivery times, particularly through better integrated IT systems within their own company, along their entire supply chain, and through big-data analytics, which has climbed very high on the ranks of importance for supply chain managers.

However, it seems no revolution is in sight for the digitalization of supply chains. Supply chain managers do not plan on transacting directly with carriers rather than using freight forwarders, and there are no major moves either to eliminate stages in the selling chain to the end customer or to significantly change batch sizes at each processing stage. Over the next three years, neither the self-declared SCM leaders nor the SCM followers are planning to make significant changes to the number of logistics partners they work with. Three-dimensional printing, a potentially disruptive technology that could change supply chains entirely by printing parts at the point of need, is expected to only play a minor role until 2017.

The pace for digitalization may increase significantly as cross-industry initiatives aim to better connect supply chains among companies to achieve next-level cost and delivery speed optimization. Linking customer data, sales forecasts, historic differences between plans and reality, and forward-looking SCM data can create much-improved supply chain planning. On the other hand, linking the transport and logistics procurement systems enabled for collaborative optimization with operational systems will be one of the tasks that go largely unsolved. Linking virtual production simulation to SCM simulation is another item that goes unchecked on many action lists.

The degree of transformation for supply chains will depend on the industry sector and company, but we expect it to create significant productivity benefits overall, both within the next three years and beyond. We strongly believe that companies may achieve exponential gains by acting on some of the supply chain digital levers not presently judged as creating revolutionary change over the next three years. In manufacturing, many companies that make smart investments in disruptive supply chain configurations will be able to create a competitive advantage for the entire business model; 3D printing will be one of them. For the short term, laying the IT and data groundwork, this study shows, is the highest priority.