This may sound corny but we live in the land of plenty. As Michael Pollen, the author of “Cooked”, puts it “If you are what you eat, and especially if you eat industrial food, as 99 percent of Americans do, what you are is ‘corn.'” http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/we-are-what-we-eat

But I don’t want to be corn. This is where the trend of mass customization it setting in. The industrial revolution was all about creating factories that could deliver massive quantities of identical product so that everyone could have some. The logistics system delivered full skid loads of boxes of cornflakes which populated the grocery shelves. The advent of computerized ERP has changed all of that. We now want to head to the store and grab the flavor of Gatorage that suits our fancy. We just expect that the shelf will be restocked with the correct flavor without giving a second thought how the modern computerized ERP systems orchestrate that action on a JIT (Just In Time) basis triggered by scanning at the cash register. The plant that bottles Gatorade does not want to have any food remaining at the end of production each day to control bugs and pests. I am happy about that because it is a whole lot better method than using pesticides that could end up in the food we eat. Since the buying public is unpredictable the ERP system has to assemble a list for the the food warehouse of the needed flavors and quantities. The warehouse assembles (kitting) skids of the correct flavors of 80 lb gastorade concentrate packages in production sequence (in e-commerce this is called fulfillment) A delivery run is made each day so that the correct raw materials are available at the start of each production day at the bottling plant. This is just one stop on the milk run that delivers ERP kitted bulk food products from the warehouse in the working day. We all got tired of eating cornflakes every day. Computer directed mass customization systems delivery the variety of goods that we want to the store shelves