Michael Tung spent more than three decades watching logistics evolve from rented shelf space to integrated supply chain management; and his central observation is quietly devastating: the better operations perform, the less anyone notices. Still On Email sat down with Michael to understand what that invisibility really costs the industry, and what comes next.
Key Takeaways
Operations is systematically undervalued because its success is defined by the absence of visible problems; not by what it actively enables. Competing on price alone is a dead end. The real financial opportunity in logistics is unlocking value through inventory control, process redesign and deeper integration into the customer's operating model. Most logistics systems were built around a perfect process. Reality is not a perfect process, and the gap between the two is still being bridged by people, not software. AI may finally make operational software genuinely adaptable, but speed without governance creates new risks around data integrity, cybersecurity and unintended automated actions. The future role of logistics professionals is not system maintenance, it is judgment, demand creation and identifying where real value can be built.
When the Operation Does Its Job, Nobody Calls
Operations has a strange problem. When it works, almost nobody notices. Orders move. Warehouses operate. Inventory is available. Deliveries arrive. Customers receive exactly what they expect.
When something breaks, however, Operations suddenly becomes very visible.
"When the operation does a good job, people will not get noticed."
That observation — offered quietly, almost in passing — says a great deal about an industry whose value is too often understood through cost rather than through what good operations actually enable. And Michael Tung has watched that industry evolve almost from the beginning.
From Auditing to Warehouse Floors
Michael did not start his career as a logistician. He began in auditing, then moved into finance at what was then a traditional warehousing business in Hong Kong. In those days, warehousing could be remarkably simple: customers delivered goods, received a warehouse reference, and later asked for those goods back.
There was little need to understand individual SKUs, batches or the customer's wider supply chain. Then, in the mid-1990s, the company decided to move from warehousing into logistics, requiring different people, different processes, and a new Warehouse Management System capable of handling a level of operational complexity that had previously not existed.
The transition did not immediately look like a success. An economic crisis hit Asia. The new logistics business struggled. Management considered winding it down.
Then a call came from Bayer.
A proposal that had already been prepared caught the customer's attention. Michael — who by his own account knew very little about logistics at the time; went to the meeting. The business came. Within weeks, roughly 30 containers per day were arriving from Germany and the warehouse filled rapidly. The decision to pursue logistics suddenly looked considerably more attractive.
It is difficult to imagine a better way to learn logistics than being forced to make it work.
Michael moved from finance into operations and business development and began implementing the operation himself alongside IT. Thirty years of expertise grew from that moment.
The Limits of Competing on Price
One of Michael's clearest observations is how much the role of the logistics provider has changed. Thirty years ago, providing space or transportation could itself be the service. Today, customers expect considerably more — and there is an obvious limit to competing through price.
If customers expect several percentage points of savings every year, Michael joked, eventually the service would have to become free.
"Real value is not necessarily about saving a dollar here or a dollar there. It comes from changing the process and changing what has historically been done."
He used an aviation example. Aircraft operators may carry enormous inventories of spare parts because the consequence of not having the right part available can be severe. But inefficient processes, unclear accountability and insufficient visibility can leave expensive parts sitting idle while additional inventory continues to be purchased.
The bigger opportunity is therefore not shaving a small amount from warehouse cost. It is understanding where inventory is, who is responsible for it, when it will become available, and how the process can be improved. Michael described an example where this kind of visibility helped significantly reduce inventory carrying cost — and his point was simple: the financial value created through better control of inventory can dwarf incremental savings on storage rates.
That raises a more important question for the logistics industry: Are we measuring operational value in the right place?
Systems Reflect the Process We Wish We Had
This was where the conversation became particularly sharp. After decades of investment in digitalisation, where does technology genuinely control logistics today — and where are people still holding the operation together?
The uncomfortable view: none of our logistics systems really reflect reality. They reflect how we wish operations worked. Systems provide structured data, reports and visibility — while operations teams still maintain an additional layer of controls to make sure the process actually happens.
Michael did not dismiss the argument. Instead, he described many traditional systems as having been designed around something close to a perfect process. Reality is different. A sales team promises something that needs to happen tomorrow. A customer changes an order. An e-commerce customer cancels unexpectedly. Another item is added. Business rules evolve faster than the systems originally built to support them.
As Michael put it, the challenge becomes: how can anyone change the system overnight to cope with the new demand?
That distinction matters. A system can represent the process perfectly and still fail to represent the operation — because operations are not static. They move. People change their minds. Customers make unexpected requests. Priorities shift. Exceptions happen. The real operation has to respond.
AI May Finally Make Software Adaptable
Michael believes AI could change that relationship fundamentally. Instead of waiting months for traditional system changes, he already sees the possibility of smaller applications and adjustments being created much more quickly to respond to changing operational requirements.
But he raised an important warning alongside that optimism. Speed and flexibility cannot come without control. Cybersecurity, data integrity and the possibility of automated systems taking unintended actions become increasingly important as AI receives more operational responsibility.
"The future is unlikely to be as simple as: AI replaces the operator. It is more likely to require a new division of responsibility between people and machines."
What Should People Still Do?
Ten or twenty years from now — what should logistics professionals still be doing themselves, and what should systems simply take away?
Michael's answer was ambitious. He expects AI agents to increasingly manage changing situations and adjust operational resources as demand shifts. In warehousing, he sees significant potential for automation to remove human intervention from large parts of physical movement — particularly in facilities designed for automation from the beginning.
So what remains for people? Michael expects human work to move toward areas where people create demand, influence decisions, train systems and identify where genuine value can be built.
The expertise becomes the judgment. Not the execution of a known process — but the ability to act when reality refuses to follow one.
That is a very different future from one where logistics professionals spend their careers maintaining spreadsheets, updating statuses or chasing information.
Operational Control Can Start Much Earlier Than the Shipment
Another thread in the conversation challenged the assumption that logistics necessarily begins when cargo starts moving. Michael explained that different supply-chain solutions can extend much further upstream.
In some customer setups, his organisation becomes involved from procurement through to final delivery. For certain food and beverage operations, for example, the logistics provider can order directly from approved vendors based on customer projections, receive the products, inspect them and distribute them according to demand.
When procurement is involved, the provider may already be working with suppliers and receiving advance shipment information before cargo physically arrives.
That changes what we mean by logistics. It stops being simply transportation or warehousing. It becomes participation in the customer's operating model — and with that comes considerably more responsibility for execution.
The Work Nobody Sees
At the end of the conversation, Michael was asked whether anything had made him think differently. His response brought the discussion back to the people doing the work.
He said he was glad someone cared about what happens in the background. Operations is difficult precisely because customers usually call when there is a problem. When everything works, very few people call simply to say that the operation performed exactly as it should.
Perhaps that is one of the contradictions of logistics. The better the operation performs, the less visible the work becomes. But behind every uneventful delivery sits an enormous collection of processes, decisions, systems, people and interventions that made "nothing happened" possible.
And as technology takes over more of the predictable work, perhaps the value of the people behind those operations will become clearer rather than smaller. Not because they are maintaining the system — but because they know what to do when reality refuses to follow it.