Bit vs Atoms in the Supply Chain

On Bits vs atoms:  Nothing new here, our enterprise did this for years, and is one of the supporters of this effort, the post below does give a good overview of the intent, but not any technical details.  It is though, all about collaborative analytics:

" ... the goal of the physical internet initiative is to improve logistics performance in terms costs and service. It believes this can be done by improving "horizontal" collaboration - that is, collaboration across players in the same echelon of the supply chain - perhaps competitors - by in part sharing logistics/transportation resources. At the same time, such an approach can also go a long way to meeting the Global Logistics Sustainability Grand Challenge, the title of an academic article in 2011 that also talks about the physical internet.

Now, the potential for logistics collaboration is nothing new. The concept and potential benefits have been well understood for years. Anecdotally, the level of such collaboration has recently seemed to have increased, driven primarily by Green imperatives. But, there are barriers, and the practice is still minimal. What this research is trying to do is to better quantify a wide ranges of benefits from such collaboration, and then take the idea even further by some fairly radical concepts around how to better modularize and integrate the supply chain ... "