Tom Neville (Limerick County, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

No. Where a number of retailers want to buy, say, batteries, there would be a platform and they would mine the data to see how many batteries they could buy or sell over a period of three or four months. They can also use the data to go back to the supplier to say they will buy a given number of batteries but at a certain price, thus driving down the cost. Has this practice progressed within the supply chain? If so, is it counteracting any competition there might be in the market? I call this "technocracy" which makes supply chains quite rigid. The supplier feels they are locked in by the technology and that the cost of removing themselves from the position is too high. It beds down the relationship a bit more and the technology, which may have been a positive in the first instance, may become a negative when the cost of moving to another relationship is too high.