In Supply Chain 4.0, supply-chain management applies Industry 4.0 innovations—the Internet of Things, advanced robotics, analytics, and big data—to jump-start performance, and customer satisfaction.

Business is now in the midst of the most significant disruption in decades. This epochal transformation has been driven largely by technological changes—big data and advanced analytics, additive manufacturing, the Internet of Things, robotics, and artificial intelligence—collectively described as the fourth industrial revolution. Arriving at dizzying speed (see sidebar “Lewis Carroll on the pace of change”), its consequences are already evident across sectors: competition is intensifying not just within industries but also between them. Think of Apple assembling an autonomous-vehicle business or Tesla moving into power supply. And then there are the aggressive, agile start-ups, with business models that ignore conventional constraints.

The relentless hype around digital in consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) manufacturing has left many leaders disoriented and paralyzed by the many buzzwords and the promised benefits of digital tools. At the same time, their efforts to gain traction with digital are hindered by legacy systems, processes, and capabilities. A recent McKinsey survey of senior CPG leaders found that most consider digital technologies to be a priority, but few have defined a clear strategic vision linked to actions. The major obstacles cited were a lack of skilled resources, out-of-date software models and an inadequate IT infrastructure, the absence of data standards, and obsolete data-management systems (Exhibit 1).

Many businesses are coming to understand that, increasingly, how an organization delivers for its customers is as important as what product or service it provides. But for companies looking to make the customer experience a strategic priority, adopting a customer-centric mind-set can be a struggle. Like many change programs, customer-experience transformations often fail to meet expectations. That’s not surprising: they require employees to change their mind-sets and behaviors, and an organization to make cultural changes and rewire itself across functions, with the customer’s needs and wants—rather than traditional organizational boundaries—in mind.

The trend is your friend.” It’s the oldest adage in investing, and it applies to corporate performance, too. We’ve found through our work on the empirics of strategy that capturing tailwinds created by industry and geographic trends is a pivotal contributor to business results: a company benefiting from such tailwinds is four to eight times more likely to rise to the top of the economic-profit performance charts than one that is facing headwinds.