Our world is constantly changing. Technologies rise and fall at the speed of sound. Staying at the forefront of change is not only an option, but it's also a requirement. You must sail the high seas as far as possible. Whether you're purchasing wholesale Chinese products online or building bridges in your city, growth and development never stop. Here are a few ways technology is changing the world before our eyes.
3-D Printing is getting more sophisticated
3-D printing is another rapidly-developing technology that promises to revolutionize the business landscape. Initially limited to polymers, recent advancements in 3-D printing have allowed a wider breadth of materials, including metals to be fabricated. For large manufacturers, this technology can offer extreme gains in flexibility over traditional manufacturing methods. Instead of dedicated tooling set up for one specific task that requires huge production volume to justify cost, the ease with which 3-D printing can be adapted to various uses can make manufacturers more flexible and significantly streamline cost structure.
This is yet another technological arena in which Chinese wholesale manufacturers are leading the charge. Initial forays into 3-D printing for their products have yielded positive results – machining and finishing operations have been simplified, quality control has been easier to manage, and projected costs are significantly lower than those of existing traditional manufacturing methods.
3-D printing also promises to democratize manufacturing. Where previously a business had to build significant scale in order to support the fixed costs of a production line, or else outsource manufacturing to someone else, 3-D printing now makes manufacturing accessible for smaller businesses who otherwise would not have had the resources to do so.
Automated End-Of-Supply-Chain Solutions
Delivering products into the hands of customers is the end of the supply chain. This stage of the supply chain often makes up a significant part of the variable costs of a retail or wholesale operation, as shipping and delivery seem unavoidable, yet are comparatively expensive. The cost comes from the fact that delivery vehicles still require people to drive them, and people have to physically take items off the vehicles and hand them to the customer. For example, Amazon’s Prime delivery service, while convenient for customers, is the primary factor in Amazon retail’s continued struggle to produce profits.
Automating the delivery process can significantly reduce costs that would otherwise be unavoidable deadweight losses. Using new drone and self-driving vehicle delivery systems, Chinese wholesale manufacturers have already begun testing with great success. Instead of transferring products from the production line to loading docks, onto trucks, to be delivered by human workers, Chinese wholesale manufacturers are able to transport their products directly from the production line to their customers via automated solutions.
An entire link of the supply chain is effectively removed, allowing significant savings in both time and cost. Part of that success is predicated on the favorable regulatory environment in China, but as the needs of the economy evolve, the regulatory landscape in Western economies appears to be ripe for adaptation to new automated delivery solutions. In the ever-cutthroat, nearly loss-leader competitive environment of wholesale and retail, the efficiencies generated by automated end-of-supply-chain solutions can make a significant difference in maintaining a competitive edge.
Brain-computer interfaces
What if you were able to control a computer or other device without ever touching it? What if you could browse the internet, make a purchase, code a program, or write an email by just thinking about it? Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), while still an infant technology, are rapidly developing to make all of that possible.
The core concept of a BCI is like the love child of science-fiction cyborgs and fantasy novel psychics. Methods include radar gesture sensing, which allows touchless interaction with digital devices through hand gestures or body movements. This can be combined with ultrasound haptic feedback – instead of your phone vibrating in response to touch input, a gesture will generate an ultrasound response that you can physically feel. Taken to its logical endpoint, integrating BCI with enhanced reality could allow customers to touch and feel a virtual product as if it were really there in front of them. Additionally, neurotechnology that reads electrical signals in the body can translate and mirror those signals onto a machine. This can be applied in both the virtual and physical realms.
The applications for BCI technology have powerful implications in the business world. Manufacturers can control machines with their minds. Marketers can create even more vivid virtual experiences that allow customers to examine and try out products in remarkably lifelike virtual environments. This brings us to the next trending tech of enhanced reality.
Enhanced Reality
This is a blanket descriptor referring to a spectrum of reality-based technologies. This spectrum includes virtual reality, which is a fully- immersive replacement of reality; augmented reality, which involves inserting generally-static digital content on top of reality; and mixed reality, which is a step above augmented reality, inserting responsive 3-D content on top of reality. These technologies have broad and significant implications for marketing and customer engagement. They can also offer novel new experiences for customers.
Already, companies like Facebook are using enhanced reality features to both entertain their users and mine a wealth of data on consumer preference and user behavior. Retailers, too, can use enhanced reality to their advantage by offering enhanced reality experiences to their customers.
Chinese wholesale manufacturers are already offering enhanced reality experiences for customers to try on, test, or examine their products, and have seen incredible results in user feedback and purchase conversions. Similarly, consumer product retailers can offer customers enhanced reality storefronts integrated with digital purchasing, which could negate the need for expensive brick-and-mortar store space and long, redundant supply chains. While enhanced reality technology is in its infancy, it holds enormous promise for marketers as a new tool to drive sales and customer engagement.
Data security and authentication
Data security and authentication is becoming an increasingly central issue in business. While digitization has allowed for advancements in inefficiency, it has also created a new arena of challenges in terms of authenticating data and verifying identities. Additionally, where there are established processes for verifying the authenticity of physical currency, digital purchasing, even via credit card, leaves room for improvement in terms of battling counterfeiting. In an increasingly digital world, how can wholesalers and retailers maintain or even enhance trust with their customers?
The emerging technology of block chain, which is a decentralized database with data packets distributed among a vast array of peer servers, offers an efficient solution to the issue of trust in the digital landscape. Because the data is scattered among independent (but still connected) storage points, there is no single point of failure, making it more difficult to fake a block chain-based digital certificate.
Especially for wholesale manufacturers, who hold the responsibility of securely managing data from the multiple clients who they supply products to, block chain offers an attractive solution. North American and European banks have been pioneering the use of block chain for these purposes. Additionally, block chain-based purchasing interfaces can make the customer experience smoother and more secure, both for the seller and the purchaser. In this arena, Chinese manufacturers have been pioneering the use of block-chain based purchasing systems for their products.
Digital Immersion
Imagine a purchasing manager being able to place a large wholesale order without ever having to touch a mouse or type on a keyboard. Or imagine a manufacturer being able to manage workflow and machining operations for their products by simply talking to their automated production line. Or imagine a marketer being able to offer seamless automated verbal interactions with customers. These are the efficiencies offered by immersive interfaces, which are streamlined methods of interfacing between the human and the digital. Humans did not evolve to alter their environments by clicking and typing. We are accustomed to touching, speaking, and feeling. Integrating those natural preferences into the digital landscape can greatly enhance user experience and engagement.
Automation
Automation promises to completely overhaul traditional manual manufacturing, marketing, and retailing processes. Concurrent advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning have allowed for seamless integration of these systems. This integration means less need for expensive human labor and costly human error, which translates into huge gains in efficiency, accuracy, and cost savings across industries.
While Western markets have been slow to adopt automated processes in consumer-facing areas, Asian markets, especially Chinese markets, are using automation to great effect.
Wholesalers have converted entire production lines to automation. This push towards automation is not limited to manufacturing tasks. Areas previously managed by humans, such as inventory management, workflow, delivery, and even deciding what to produce have been taken over by artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms using the power of big data to optimize product management.
Chinese wholesalers and retailers have automated advertising and marketing, using smart devices and integrated social media to target advertising to user preferences. Even the end of the supply chain – the point of purchase – has been automated. There are prototype retail stores that use predictive analytics to optimize shelving layouts, handle customer flow and streamline the purchasing process. The net effect of all these advancements has been higher sales, lower costs and greater customer engagement.
Virtual prototyping
Virtual prototyping is like a dress rehearsal for a product, service or process. Instead of costly manual/physical prototyping, virtual prototyping offers wholesalers, retailers and marketers to test their prototypes using virtual replicas in a digital environment. This allows for unprecedented flexibility. Marketers can test an ad campaign in a virtual target market. A wholesale manufacturer, for instance, can experiment with a production process without ever changing the settings on an actual machine, or they can market-test a product and understand its life cycle without having to assemble a focus group or produce a prototype.
As with the other advancements, the Chinese markets are leading the world in implementation. Chinese wholesale manufacturers have already been projecting their product life cycles in digital environments and focus-testing their products with virtual B2B customer avatars built by machine learning algorithms. Many of these wholesale products have already gone to market with great success, credited to the value-added by the virtual prototyping process. As this technology matures, it promises to change the entire global landscape in marketing, product development and manufacturing.
Connectivity and the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IOT) is an ecosystem of networked devices that blur the line between the physical and the digital – think smart watches, smart phones, or even smart yoga mats. While these devices are designed for a specific purpose, a byproduct of their purpose is constant data generation. That byproduct can be leveraged into further value by a company sophisticated enough to understand its significance. IoT creates seamless connections between people and automated systems.
The significance of these advancements to retailers, wholesalers, and marketers cannot be understated. IOT devices offer a treasure trove of useful data, which can be used to enhance the user experience of the device itself and develop marketing to convert users to other products and services. This is the sleeper hit of IOT – while users use these networked devices, they are also producing valuable data on consumer behavior and product preferences that manufacturers and advertisers can mine to optimize their processes and product offerings. This creates a symbiotic environment wherein wholesalers and retailers can provide the products customers want, customers get better products and marketers can better bridge the gap between supply and demand.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) and its counterpart, machine learning, are the catalysts driving the ability to turn the mountains of data generated by IoT into the effective use of IoT, virtual prototyping and automation. In turn, the massive increase in data generated by digitization fuels the advancement of AI and machine learning. This synergy creates enormous opportunities.
Advances in AI and machine learning allow for much efficiency that can negate the need for humans to manage complex tasks.
Using AI, computers can now hear and understand human speech, talk in response to human speech, understand human emotion and see and process visual information. Machine learning takes that ability to the next step – in addition to understanding collected information, machine learning allows computers to modify their behavior and processes to react to stimuli and change in their environments.
This is a powerful tool. Manufacturers will no longer have to actively manage their production lines. Marketers can let AI and machine learning takes the wheel of social media accounts and SEO. Retailers and wholesalers can automate their entire supply chains. And all of that can be done with the same, or better, sophistication and adaptability that human management was able to achieve.
