Scenario planning project using MIT-developed method, and led by MIT alum, is published by the Australian Government as part of Inquiry into National Freight and Supply Chain Priorities.
(DARWIN, 18 May 2017) Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, the Hon Michael McCormack MP has released on Friday 18 May 2017 the highly anticipated final report of the Inquiry into National Freight and Supply Chain Priorities. The Inquiry was led by an industry expert panel and conducted by the Department of Infrastructure, Regional Development and Cities (DIRD). It represents the starting point of a 20-year National Freight and Supply Chain Strategy for Australia, to be published later this year.
The report’s release took place in the 9th meeting of the Transport and Infrastructure Council, held in Darwin. “The Inquiry generated significant levels of support within industry for the development of a national freight strategy”, said the Council in a Communiqué, adding that this future strategy “will form the basis of an integrated approach to improving the connectivity of all freight modes and supply chains”.
A key component of the Inquiry was a scenario planning project, commissioned last year by DIRD, and conducted by the Centre for Supply Chain and Logistics (CSCL) at Deakin University. This scenario planning project adapted a methodology originally developed in 2010 by the Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a similar scenario planning in the United States, called Future Freight Flows (FFF), under the leadership of Dr Chris Caplice.
Deakin's CSCL was in a unique position to adapt the MIT-developed methodology to the Australian case, since Dr Roberto Perez-Franco (MEng '04, PhD '10), an MIT alum and former member of MIT’s FFF Core Research Team, joined the CSCL team at Deakin University, led by Dr Hermione Parsons, on March of 2017. Before that, Dr Perez-Franco spent six years at MIT as a research associate in CTL, where he served as Director of the MIT Supply Chain 2020 Project and founded the MIT Supply Chain Strategy Lab.
Through qualitative interviews, CSCL identified approximately 200 future drivers of change, which were grouped into categories and validated by means of a survey. According to their uncertainty and impact, these driving forces were used to create a set of four scenarios, imagining the world in 2037. Using these scenarios as the background, a series of workshops were conducted across Australia with experts from the supply chain and logistics industry, with the purpose of eliciting insights about ways for Australia to be successful in these challenging and competing versions of the future.
A summary of the findings from this project were compiled into a paper submitted to DIRD in November 2017. That final paper, along with its appendices, have now been made public, along with the final Inquiry report. “CSCL’s work is one of the first serious pieces of scenario work in the Australian transport sector”, says the Inquiry Report. “It offers a good starting point from which more detailed scenario planning work can be built.”