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How a Unified Logistics Approach Drives the Customer-Centric Supply Chain

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How a Unified Logistics Approach Drives the Customer-Centric Supply Chain

How a Unified Logistics Approach Drives the Customer-Centric Supply Chain

No matter the hurdles of 2020, Logistics was up for the challenge. It kept production running and critical supplies flowing while adjusting to the shocks in demand and supply patterns and delivering essential goods.

The industry has already begun its transformation into a pull paradigm. To adjust to a new logistics footprint, operations are catering to smaller and more frequent shipments, while increasing its stronghold in eCommerce. With shippers and Logistics Service Providers (LSPs) attempting to increase their capabilities for market share gain, gone will be reactive bulk handing, serial execution, and long planning cycles.

Now it’s time for logistics to up its game — again.

How can it morph from inside-out, efficiency-focused to a model that’s outside-in and centered around the customer experience? We believe the future of logistics is unified logistics, where shippers and LSPs can seamlessly plan, optimize, and orchestrate across nodes and networks, resulting in consistently higher customer service levels and efficiencies.

Let’s discuss the aspects that make unified logistics a reality.

Boundaryless Orchestration

Existing logistics systems are usually configured with static, pre-setup actions, and often lack advanced visibility. Even if visibility exists, the functionality does not allow timely execution. Warehouse systems may not be able to consider transportation information and vice versa.

Upstream Supply Chain Knowledge

Traditionally, transportation systems lack order visibility and updated supply chain plan information. In the warehouse, traditional distribution and fulfillment operations rely on aggregate and longer-term forecasts to plan labor schedules. The inventory positions in warehouse systems are determined by historical patterns and longer-term forecasts, causing operations to be reactive.

Digital Ecosystem and Network

The historic approach to collaboration and point-to-point integration won’t create an easy path to real-time communications for carriers and LSPs. Now with access to the digital network, shippers can tap into carrier networks, take capacity into considerations for order promising, and select last-mile delivery providers. Before, the carrier selection process was highly manual and used static rates, and now shippers can perform Dynamic Price Discovery to view freight rate quotes from carrier marketplaces.

Unified Logistics, powered by our Luminate Logistics and Luminate Platform solutions, arms shippers and LSPs with the ability to seamlessly plan, optimize, and orchestrate supply chain execution. They can gain consumer confidence by truly delivering the right product, to the right place, at the right time — even if the lot size is small.

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How Humans and Robots Will Work Side-by-Side in the Supply Chain

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Humans and robots can work in harmony to create a safer, more efficient working world, here’s what that world might look like.

Robots and Humans Working Together
In Robots in the Supply Chain: The Perfect Employee? Merril Douglas paints a picture of a time in the near future when robots and humans will work side-by-side to help companies gain speed, increase accuracy, cut costs, and handle the grunt work.

“We’re sitting in the middle of a perfect storm for robots in the supply chain. E-commerce sales continue to climb, forcing retailers to pick up the pace in their fulfillment and distribution centers,” Douglas writes.

“But these days, it’s hard to find workers to keep product moving in any kind of warehouse e-commerce or otherwise.”

We’re already seeing examples of robots being designed to take over the supply chain’s least attractive tasks. “In some cases, robotic systems do this work entirely on their own, freeing humans for more complex functions,” Douglas points out.

“In other instances, bots collaborate with humans. Whatever the scenario, proponents say that these automated solutions provide a big productivity boost.”

Some companies are deploying robots to perform repetitive, simple job tasks and allowing human laborers to focus on tasks that require deeper thinking and strategizing.

The new term for this collaboration, “cobot,” allows each type of worker to focus on the tasks they do best.

For example, bots can be used to deliver products from place-to-place in the warehouse, DC, or yard; autonomous drones can perform mundane and repetitive inventory management tasks (as well as tasks that are dangerous for humans, such as flying up to view inventory on high shelves); and robots can lift shelving units from densely-packed storage areas and then transport those goods to a picking station.

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CPG Supply Chains are adapting to disruption, new research finds

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0Online shopping, new digital technologies, and increasing channel fragmentation are intensifying the pressures on US consumer packaged goods (CPG) supply chains.

There are clear steps CPG companies must take in order to prepare, according to a new report authored by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and commissioned by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA).

The report, ‘How CPG Supply Chains Are Preparing for Seismic Change’, highlights the top trends affecting CPG supply chains and the effect on CPG companies’ performance.

Among the issues addressed in the report: e-commerce sales growth, service-level performance, channel proliferation, network design, and cash management trends.

The report is based on the 2017 Supply Chain Benchmarking Study, a study of the US units of more than 30 leading CPG companies conducted jointly by BCG and GMA.

“It’s been a turbulent couple of years for the grocery industry, with major disruption and dislocation in the retail landscape,” commented Daniel Triot, senior director of the Trading Partner Alliance of GMA and the Food Marketing Institute.

“Despite the important performance gains in the supply chain in the past two years, CPG companies cannot be complacent. This report aims to provide guidance for CPG companies looking to harness new digital technologies and trends to support continued growth.”

Over the next two years, half the growth in North American grocery sales will come from e-commerce. But only 6% of CPG companies have a dedicated e-commerce supply chain team, and only 3% are able to fully track sales by channel.

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What to Expect from the Logistics & Shipping Sectors as E-Commerce Grows Up

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Driven by new technologies and e-commerce growth, changes in the global supply chain are expected to impact industrial real estate for the foreseeable future.

Since 2012, Amazon has been aggressively expanding its logistics and shipping services worldwide, disrupting traditional supply chain operators with direct competition for their business.

Chinese “e-tail” giant Alibaba, meanwhile, has deployed technology that cuts into a portion of third-party logistics (3PL) operator profits.

Alibaba’s “One Touch” platform automates export-related services, such as customs clearance and logistics, to make it cost-efficient for small/medium-sized merchants to participate in the global marketplace.

Cyclical and structural factors, including overcapacity in the container shipping industry and greater use of technology in manufacturing, retail and logistics industries, are also disrupting the sector.

Automation and robots are replacing manufacturing, logistics and warehouse workers. A survey by PwC found that 59 percent of all U.S. manufacturers are using robots for some tasks.

A recent report from real estate services firm Colliers International analyzes how these changes are impacting the logistics landscape. The report also looks at the impacts on industrial and logistics properties.

Report author Bruno Berretta, associate director with Colliers International who leads the firm’s pan-European research activities, says that Amazon Prime has entered the logistics market to take control of its supply chain and improve delivery times. He notes that unofficially Amazon is becoming a 3PL service to third parties.

The company is making a big push to establish a logistics network, opening smaller distribution facilities near customers, according to Berretta, who suggests that Amazon is likely to start competing with traditional 3PL services as it opens new markets.

Additionally, Amazon wants to reduce shipping costs, which have a big impact on profits. The Colliers report notes that in 2015 Amazon spent $11.5 billion on shipping costs, which equated to 10 percent of its global sales. By delivering its own goods and using technology to streamline deliveries, the company estimates it would save $3 per package, or $1.1 billion annually.

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