PROLOG SUPPLY CHAIN CONFERENCE 2021

DHL Trend Radar is the DHL Innovation Centre's exclusive annual overview of the business and technology trends shaping the future of supply chains and logistics. The pandemic has tested supply chains around the world and challenged the logistics industry how to cope with a situation where air traffic is non-existent, cross-border trade is hampered and panic buying is taking place around the world.

The latest Trend Radar focuses on trends that will help companies prepare for the new normal, because if your supply chain is the same as it was before the coronavirus, you're probably doing something wrong. For her presentation at the conference, Kristina Laaneots, CEO of DHL Express, has picked out the most important logistics trends from the Trend Radar, which if practised will help you to continue your business in today's environment.

She will also take a look at older Trend Radars and see how their predictions have materialised, and give examples of how they have changed her company's business.

There is a lot of talk about 5G, but in reality we still don't know exactly what it will bring and what opportunities it will create, for example in logistics and supply chains. Andrus Durejko probably knows more than any of us. Ericsson has carried out a pan-European analysis of the benefits of building a 5G network in different countries. Sectors such as logistics, freight transport, public transport, etc. were included. At the conference, Andrus will talk about how much we stand to gain financially from 5G deployment, and where these benefits will come from in freight transport and logistics.

Tallinn University of Technology, in collaboration with Silberauto, built Estonia's first (Europe's third) self-driving car already in 2018. However, its presentation to the public on the 100th anniversary of the university was only the first step. Today, the car has been further developed, as well as the whole conceptual idea of how to implement the self-driving car in a world with existing and slowly widening restrictions on self-driving vehicles for the benefit of us all. There are a number of pilot projects underway which will best inform what is actually happening in this area (including how people feel about the issue and where they see the most application for self-driving at the moment). The presentation will focus on building this bigger picture and broader view.

The fight for electronic components is at the highest level. Negotiations are being held between business leaders and national prime ministers to ensure that industries have the components they need to continue production. As a sales representative for one of the world's largest suppliers of electronic components, Hanno Septer is in the thick of this fight every day. He can tell us how we got into this situation, what the consequences are and how we can now get out of it.

The importance of information throughout the supply chain is growing. Increasingly, an organisation's success depends on the trade secrets it shares with suppliers, resellers and logistics partners. Covid-19 created a crack in this chain. Mass organised attacks on different parts of the supply chain became a new trend. In the summer of 2020, there were organised attacks against major service providers in Estonia. The attacks took advantage of the changes brought about by new working conditions and the distraction of employees. Access was gained to organisations' systems, user accounts and passwords. In turn, the supply chain, partnerships and customer relationships of the targeted organisations were used to attack their systems. In total, hundreds of organisations' IT systems were accessed. Although some of these attacks were detected and access was blocked, successful attacks using the same attack vectors continue to this day.

Supply chain security is directly dependent on the trust between partners and the level of personal due diligence of each party involved, and whether the best supply chain security policies exist only on paper or are actually implemented.

When the pandemic arrived, everyone underestimated the scale and potential duration of the crisis. Supply chains were structured for peacetime - there had been no major, widespread disruption for some time and the focus was only on the unit price. But in a crisis, everything became unpredictable - both the emergence of disease outbreaks and the response of countries. A problem with many variables emerged for everyone, but no one was ready to solve it.

The arrival of the corona pandemic sent the world into a panic. Countries started making decisions ... which turned out to be the wrong decisions, says procurement expert Hans Casteel.

The Estonian Open Air Museum is like a kind of Estonian village on the outskirts of the city, with buildings dating from 1699 to 2020. The buildings in this village were not built on site. Houses from different eras have been brought together on the grounds of the Rocca al Mare summer manor from different regions of Estonia. Originally, the houses were built of wood, but over time the building materials have changed and different techniques are used to move them. The last to arrive was a 2-storey, silicate-brick, board-built workers' dwelling from the 1960s, which was like inventing a bicycle to transport from the other end of Estonia.