The Transportation and Logistics industry is poised to be rocked with two trending technologies as we move into the new year. The first and should be no surprise is IoT. IoT has reached a level of maturity and shall make a considerable incursion into the world of Logistics and Transportation.
We’ve all seen examples of automated warehouses, robotic operators and very soon IoT devices which will drive data into the Cloud from these centers for decision making, automation and improved efficiencies. We closely observe IoT operators who will eventually transform these solutions into SaaS to provide data streams and analytics for decision making.
In transportation, the promise of IoT is largely untapped, but could be explosive. Think about vehicles, scheduling their service stops, self diagnose or analyze downloaded trip maps to create self driving plans with planning on delivery times during known successful windows from historical data enabled by data analytics. Isn’t this how it’s supposed to work?
The second and perhaps more important enablers are Mobile Computing Technologies. It is possible to develop powerful Mobile solutions today, which create the rich last mile customer experience for Logistics. Combined with Transportation and warehousing, Mobile logistics can play an integrator of rich experiences for customers and create integrated networks of high efficiencies. We are looking forward to such intersections to provide customers with SaaS solutions of next generation Logistics and Transportation.
Competitive edges are obtained when new technology replaces the old with improvements in efficiencies. The most important factor is time and technologies focused on saving time are the most powerful. Today, almost 80% of the delivery time is due to “wait” time for clearances, checking, warehousing or similar globally. New technologies where IoT and Mobile Technologies intersect have the potential to knock off more than 20% to 25% of such delivery times since they can be deployed continuously day or night. Just including a seamless Day-Night operation can recover significant efficiency in Logistics.
Today, we are involved with a number of Logistics projects where we are focused at reducing such cycle times, saving significant time and money. In one case, Nexshore has helped a customer save 40% costs over previously used manual processes while reducing processing times from Hours to minutes in most tasks on critical processes. From developing software to lower documentation to Security declaration mandates to worldwide Customs clearances, Nexshore Technologies is constantly striving to bring excellence to Logistics.