Interview with Sean Culey following opening keynote at the Momentum conference in Prague, October 2018, where Sean discusses the digital revolution, the increasing rise of artificial intelligence and robotics in industry and the impact that these technologies are likely to have on the economy and society.

In the last 30 years S&OP improved performance in many businesses. However, S&OP has not yet substantially delivered on its ultimate promise of enterprise wide resource management, rolling financial forecasting and strategy deployment.

In this interview at the 2017 P3 Logistics Conference in Prague, Sean discusses concepts such as delivery motherships, why voice is the new interface, the biggest challenges for humanity in a world of AI and robots, whether he is positive or negative about the future, and the extent to which robots will replace human labour.

The world is changing. New tools, technologies and ideologies are redrawing the boundaries of what is humanly possible. In an informative and far-reaching presentation at CILT International Convention in Macao, renowned business transformation expert Sean Culey put these changes into a historical context, and explained how the cyclical nature of capitalism and the exponentially powerful effects of technology mean we are on the verge of a new paradigm in human progress.

In this article on Forbes Sean goes beyond the rhetoric and investigates whether China, robots or just changing economics is the real reason for the decline in manufacturing in the US. He proposes an approach to breathe new life into these areas and revitalise the manufacturing industry.

Will industrial robots sweep aside millions of human jobs, or create thousands of new smart businesses? This report by journalist Chris Middleton on Sean’s keynote at The Rise of the Machines summit in London.

"Technology is not self-deterministic, it doesn't have its own agency. It depends on how we use it as a society" - Sean Culey

In this interview with Dr. Ivor Blumenthal, Sean Culey describes the rise of the Sixth Wave, and how we are experiencing what he has named as the Personal, Automated and Local Supply Chain.

Interview with Sean Culey on the topic of automation and the Supply Chain, where San shares his views and answers questions about how robotics, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, big data and AI is going to transform the world of work.

Ever since the dust settled from the global economic crash of 2008, business leaders have had to accept that there is a new normal; a world of demand volatility and uncertainty.

Sean recently delivered a talk at the SCL Hub supply chain event in London, on the topic of ‘Empowering the Agile Supply Chain’. This presentation was recorded and is now available on YouTube.

APICS hosted webinar on the topic of the UK referendum result on June 23rd to leave the EU, with panellists Sean Culey, Professor Richard Wilding and Jeffery LeClair.

In just 20 years, Amazon has grown from an online startup focusing on selling books, to a devastating multi-platform, multi-industry technological disruptor, predicted to be worth $3 trillion by 2026.

With the conference season now in full swing, it’s easy to get carried away with latest trend predictions and the hype cycle surrounding new technological achievements. The key is to be able to quickly differentiate between those things that constitute real knowledge and those that are just noise. One of the terms that has caught my eye however is ‘business real-time’.

Earlier in 2015 Sean presented a full version of his ‘Transformers: Supply chain 3.0’ presentation at the Integrated Supply Chain Istanbul conference 2015, and the video of this session is now available on YouTube or via this website. There is a great Q/A session at the end where Sean discusses the effect these new technologies will have on both the economic model and on society as a whole that is worth a watch – a snippet into some of the research that will form part of his new book ‘Transition Point: Revolution, Evolution or Endgame?’

Last week I made the (very) long return trip to Melbourne, Australia to deliver a keynote presentation at the SMART Supply Chain conference at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. I also had the pleasure of being asked to sit on a panel of experts and senior business leaders discussing the impact of technology in the supply chain.

Sean was recently invited to speak at the Leaders in Supply Chain executive briefing in London on the subject of how the new technological innovations will impact the shape and structure of the supply chain of the future.

Back in 2004, a famous, and somewhat confrontational, Harvard Business Review article was published by Nicholas G Carr, called ‘Does IT Matter?’ In this, he suggested that organisations are wrong to continue to make large scale investments in software like ERP, as the availability of this software has resulted in it becoming ubiquitous, something that every organisation can own. He therefore reasons that as every organisation can own these tools, they cannot provide competitive advantage.

In the last twelve months we have seen governments topple, tsunamis and earthquakes cause personal and Supply Chain devastation, the continued fall out of the banking crisis, public sector strikes in the UK and major European countries unable to service their debt and on the brink of bankruptcy, potentially causing the collapse of the Euro. For as long as I’ve been alive (let’s not go there) I don’t recall a period of time when the immediate outlook appears to be so glum, without any obvious signs of recovery.

Really enjoyed the keynote presentation at the Supply Chain World conference by Richard Reed, co-founder of Innocent Drinks – the presentation with the least slides but biggest impact! (I’m sure my presentation coach said something along these lines! I know, Mike I know)...

Towards the end of 2011, I spoke at the Harvard Business Review’s Conference on Supply Chain Risk Management in Poland, where I presented the concept that Risk Management should be incorporated into the very fabric of the business, and seen as an opportunity to evaluate the end-to-end Supply Chain, identifying its strengths, threats and weaknesses, and positioning all of these as opportunities to improve.

I was lucky enough to fit in a week’s vacation over the summer, which we spent exploring the rich tapestry of history that is Rome. Now as I’m sure you all know, Rome was, for a while, the centre of the world – first, literally, as the hub of the Roman Empire, and second culturally, during the time of the Renaissance.

Great article on the change of mindset and behaviours in the new generation of people entering the labour market in the current edition of the European Business Review called; ‘Managing Digital Natives – Opportunity or Challenge’ by Jonsen, Martin and Weg.

25th January 2013 – An interesting thing happened today. Exactly one year previously, Apple was crowned the world’s most valuable company – today it lost that position to Exxon. To many, this might be dismissed as an insignificant blip.

Metrics are a funny thing. They are the way we keep score, the way we determine whether we are winning, the way we identify whether we are making progress.

As an advisor and consultant to numerous businesses on implementing and maximising the value of their ERP investments, one of the more worrying facets of engagements I’ve witnessed over the last 20 years has been the increasing inability of business people, especially those from the Supply Chain, to engage, affect and influence the utilisation or development of these IT solutions.

In the last post I discussed how many companies have responded to the economic downturn by taking an increasingly short term, quarterly profit based view of their business – and reducing any investment in long term activities like innovation, learning and business improvement initiatives.

(Or why ‘the way we do things round here’ stops us from doing things around here!)

Recent research by the Conference Board asked executives across the world what their ‘greatest concerns’ were – the top two answers, surprisingly, were not external factors, but instead were:

I wrote an email today for a student I met at a Supply Chain Conference who had enormous drive, talent and capability but mentioned that she encountered a number of people who were taken aback by her style and confidence. I shared with her what the biggest lessons I have learnt (painfully) about working in business, and afterwards thought it would make a nice blog post to share with you all.

Are we selling the future to survive today? You’d be hard pushed to find anyone who’d disagree that times are both tough and uncertain at the moment.