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The enormous growth of Facebook and Twitter users has proven
that people do not mind ‘sharing’ things online even though they don’t really
share too much in real life. This phenomenon even gave rise to a new term ‘shareconomy’ which is a sustainable
economic system that lets people share various assets ranging from cars to
apartments to economy.
Social Media and the
Market:
The concept of sharing information by internet users is very
useful for the companies because 44% of these users provide their
experiences/opinions about the product/service. This gives rise to a huge pool
of ideas and customer specific information online which the companies can
analyze using Big Data and Data Mining tools. Lot of companies have already
started this process which facilitates them to integrate the customer in the
product development process. This phenomenon is called “crowdsourcing”
Is Crowdsourcing the new Outsourcing?
Lot of innovative startups
including Sourcemap have introduced a variety of tools using Social Media and
Analytics to crowdsource and help organizations map and visualize their highly
complex supply chains more effectively. Companies usually struggle with mapping
their supply chains when they get to second or third tiers and these tools can
help them do this thereby adding strategic and operational value.
There’s been a lot of activity in this area in the recent years. In
2010, The Hoop fund was established by a group of entrepreneurs and leading sustainable
brands. Their goal was to bring consumers and producers together, crowdfund
microloans to producers and transform the sustainable value-chains into platforms
for customer engagement. The Hoop engages customers as mission-aligned
lenders. Eventually, customers become become loyal brand champions by supporting
the farmers and artisans who make their favorite products.
Brands
have gone all the way into the crowdsourcing arena by venturing into launching
their product shoots on Instagram( a popular photo sharing social network).
Success story: Unilever
crowdsources!
Unilever adopted a crowdsourcing approach, inviting all
stakeholders, not just NGOs and governments, to take part in the effort to find
the ways to meet its goals. They introduced a new “open Innovation platform” to
gather and assess ideas from external sources. They also initiated the “Sustainable
Living Lab”, a 24-hour online dialogue to discuss about the challenges Unilever
is facing and to create new ideas thereby allowing all the players to share
good practices.
Unilever’s current objective is
to reduce its carbon footprint by half. But on the discussion forum, the major problem
discussed was changing customer behavior. Reducing Unilever’s footprint means
changing 68% of their customers’ footprint but how do you do it?
How to convince people to wash their clothes in lower
temperatures or use less water when they shower?
And how do you integrate Unilever products into the process
of shifting consumers to a more sustainable behavior?
These questions remained unanswered
but Unilever proved that they can not only draw an impressive roadmap but can
also follow it.
The following video shows
Unilever’s ambitious sustainable living change initiative:
I'm really interested to know to what extent will Unilever and its customers achieve their goals of sustainable living.
Unilever successfully employed
crowdsourcing. I found their supply chain maps on Sourcemap.com
Which included various players
and they provide comprehensive information about the flow of their supply chain
to each other.
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| Public supply chain of Ben&Jerry’s(Unilever product) on sourcemap.com Clicking on each node gives information about the manufacturer/distributor/exporter/importer etc. |
But to gain the strategic advantages,
businesses require forecasting systems that provide accurate statistical
information based on historic sales and dynamic parameters which learn
continuously. Data obtained from crowdsourcing can then be utilized for
supporting and verifying suggestions given by forecasting systems. This will
enable supply chain managers to improve the flexibility of the supply chain by
keeping current and future planning parameters up to date. More reliable
information should increase availability, improve optimization of stock levels
and allow you to confidently make the most appropriate planning decisions.
I strongly believe that the businesses
should become more “social” in their approach to supply chain management.
What do you think?
References:
4)http://www.crowdsourcing.org/document/unilever-improves-supply-chain-faces-challenges-with-customer-behavior/13896
6)http://mitsloan.mit.edu/actionlearning/media/documents/s-lab-projects/Unilever-report.pdf
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