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Yossi Sheffi, an engineering systems professor at MIT, serves as director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. EE Times recently sat down with him to discuss part of his new book, “The Magic Conveyor Belt: Supply Chains, AI, and the Future of Work.”
Yossi, two parts of your book stood out as important for EE Times readers: Part 3, “vital link in the chain: humans,” and Part 4, “looking forward.” We were particularly struck by your discussion of two companies: JD.com, in China, and Moderna, in Massachusetts. What would you like to share with us about JD.com?
JD.com is in the forefront of introducing robotics and information into the warehouse. JD.com is the second-largest e-commerce company in China, after Alibaba. But it’s technologically more advanced—and growing faster—than Alibaba.
I visited JD.com just before the pandemic. I saw a distribution center near Shanghai that was fully automated. They used to have several hundred workers, and they got down to less than 10. It was totally automated. But at the same time, they’re finding out that it’s not working as well as they hoped, so they’re adding workers throughout the system. They have actually increased their employment while introducing a lot of robotics.
You noted in your book that the automated warehouse you visited is now the size of at least seven football fields. How many people does it employ now?
Now, my guess would be two dozen workers.
You also note in your book that JD.com has been planning to build a bunch of drone airports in China. What will they be like?
That’s right. The idea has many variations. One of them is to build a “drone airport” on the roof of a distribution center that’s in the city. But they wouldn’t build them in the center of Shanghai or Beijing where there are skyscrapers; they would build them in rural areas.
They’ve also been experimenting with drones that fly from the warehouse—and with drones that fly from vehicles. (UPS is also trying to have vehicles that move around and send drones off around them with packages). This is all in the still experimentation stage.
Do you know what kind of jobs these experimental airports might bring about?
That’s interesting. The final vision is that the drones will be like military drones: They will be piloted by people on the ground; the drones aren’t going to be totally automated. But one person can pilot multiple drones because a lot of the delivery is automatic: They fly from A to B. You don’t need to monitor them closely while they fly; they only need close monitoring in the last minute of flight.
Yossi, let’s turn our attention to Moderna. What did you discover about it as you researched your book?
Moderna’s headquarters is about a block from my office [here in Cambridge]. When the pandemic started, it was a 10-year-old company that didn’t have even one product. It’s interesting from a supply chain point of view that, within 10 months of the start of the pandemic, it went from a company with no product to making a product that had to be sold by the billions.
The materials-procurement and supply-chain challenges were daunting. But they did it. They did it because of collaboration with a lot of other companies.
For example, the entire pharmaceutical industry—all the people who were developing vaccines—had a problem getting the apes they needed for clinical trials. Then it dawned on them that they didn’t have to do everything independently; they could share data [on the monkeys in studies that were given the placebo instead of the vaccine].
Also, because Moderna was a digital company from the start, it was able to move quickly from the lab to manufacturing. They collected data from every process and fed it to an analytics engine.
We all know that Moderna succeeded in quickly manufacturing its Covid-19 vaccines, in large part because of mRNA technology. What did you learn about that technology and the importance of it going forward?
I wrote a different book about this—called “A Shot in the Arm.” I was very lucky that there are several Nobel Laureates at MIT who are involved in the development of mRNA, and I was schooled by probably some of the best in the business about the biology of mRNA.
One chapter of the book describes what mRNA is, how it was developed… For years, the conventional wisdom was that vaccines couldn’t be based on mRNA because the body would just kill it. But they were able to find a good “envelope” that would get it into the right location in the body… The good thing about the mRNA is that the same framework can be used for many, many other things… So, they’re now working on cancer vaccines, as well as on an mRNA therapeutic to rebuild the heart after one has a heart attack.
When you think about all that you’ve been writing about—particularly the supply chain as it relates to electronics—what do you see as the main challenges the industry needs to address in the next couple of years?
When we live in the middle of a chip shortage, there’s no question there will be a chip glut in two to three years. It’s happened in the past, so many times: We go from too little to too much.
Material is another big challenge. For example, tungsten, the mineral, is very important for chip manufacturing. China has 80% of the world’s supply—not only 80% of the world’s supply of the mineral but also of the smelters. And they control the supply chain. The funny thing is that the U.S. does have tungsten in the ground. We can mine it. But because of environmental concerns, we don’t give permits and allow people to mine it. And that’s true about many rare earth minerals that are needed even for green initiatives like electronic vehicles. A lot of these rare earth minerals are mined in China, and smelted in China.
According to some estimates, the U.S. has the largest deposits in the world of rare earth minerals, yet they remain in the ground. They don’t help anybody when they’re in the ground.
Now, of course, the problem is that, like anybody else, I like clean air and clean water. But I think sometimes we forget that there’s a huge price to pay for strict environmental standards. We may want to find more middle-of-the-road solutions because mines in the United States would be a lot more responsible than mines in China in terms of keeping environmental laws in mind and reclaiming the ground after that.
So, we need to start doing this and get off the one-dimensional thinking about sustainability—because there are many elements of well-being and sustainability, as important as it is, is only one of them. We need to think more expansively.
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