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Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
April 2021 #13261 Page #46
Industry Ecosystems and the Future By Ben Hershey Solutions Provider & CEO 4Ward Solutions Group
mitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I am sure you have heard that statement before, and I am sure you, like 4Ward, have pivoted/changed a program/created a new product/etc. and then seen a competitor imitate it. It might bother you, but most of the time, they just do not have the creative ability to come up with something new; so they just copy. There are some who just rehash the same-old formula or idea again and again without recognizing times have changed.
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It was more than three years ago that I knew 4Ward needed to adapt and change in how we provided solution services for customers and thus we as a team continued to transform how we operated. It wasn’t about charging a higher price for services, it was about providing the industry with a platform from which they could find what they needed. We didn’t need to copy someone else, like some have, we just moved forward and created the path for transformation, thus expanding our ecosystems. Our industry, whether structural components, lumber dealers and building materials, modular, millwork, etc., sometimes finds itself unable to change to meet the operational demands required, particularly in the areas of leveraging data or in advanced automation equipment. But outside our industry, the movement to the future of industry ecosystem models has been advancing for years, such as in automotive, aerospace, and life sciences, where the trend has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Why are industry ecosystems critical for success in the digitally transformed, disrupted world we live in today? It’s because the complexity of products, supply chains, customer experiences, and changing market and consumer needs are too great for any one organization to address on its own.
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