Just think about the days how people plan/do their road trips now in comparison to twenty years ago. Your first thought most likely would be about how GPS systems (smartphones) came into our lives that had made navigation much easier. Not to mention, those days are behind us now, where drivers were required to buy physical maps and chart their courses manually. Also, businesses or companies started using different types of transportation management solutions.
Additionally, you would also want to consider various ways in which modern cars are better for road trips and journeys, because of their built-in GPS systems, Bluetooth hookups for music or getting navigational instructions from your smartphone, and improved safety features, such as alerts if you’re digressing to a different lane. But, what about the traveling price that got affected because of all of these convenience-adding features?
Or, it may be the first thing that comes to mind, but one should also consider taking the most convenient route and changing the routes with the rise of new traffic conditions saves on fuel costs.
In this blog, you will see how this digital revolution is having a similar impact on logistics costs:
Snap Decisions
As mentioned above, travelers in the digital age are given the information they require to make swift, informed decisions, that is, choosing a route or lodgings during a multi-day trip. With the growth of digital shipping, many businesses are realizing that the same phenomenon applies to their logistics operations.
Both shippers and freight forwarders dynamically route and reroute their fleets to account for the changing conditions, even they make rapid cost-benefit calculations to figure out the most convenient options for getting goods to their customers at the given time.
For example, your company is shipping replacement parts to an auto repair shop, and another shop that is located nearby registers their requirement for a specific part or parts, you could simply use live tracking and digital manifests to see whether you can reroute the existing shipment to the cover the requirements of the other shop so that they could receive their order the same day. Also, you can replicate the effects of these changes on your whole supply stream and decide if you are needed to adjust your production plans or capacity usage.
It doesn’t matter, whether you are using your own freight or digitally-enabled 3PL services, this minor flexibility could help you to give maximum value for your clients within the least valued chain structure.
Advanced Analytics
Digital workflows allow manufacturers, shippers, and freight forwarders to collect mission-critical information on each and every stage of production and transport, from data about machine efficiency to data of truck and container locations. Consequently, it’s possible to get a thorough and detailed understanding of one’s logistics operations than it was before.
This makes it simple to manually search for areas of inefficiency or lookout for potential disruptions, and it creates an environment in which businesses have the availability of essential data to run algorithms of prescriptive and predictive analytics.
In addition, these processes can help in predicting the outcomes of several scenarios by creating digital copies of your supply chain and running reproduction on it. They can also evaluate your existing operations with the help of prescriptive processes in order to uncover areas of waste and inefficiency.
A More Flexible Value Chain
Do you remember the example of a road trip that is mentioned above? How digital technology is helping to keep your costs down? Similarly, in logistics, this same kind of technology can work in your favor in digital environments. For example, it can help you to uncover excellent and smarter ways of routing and bundling shipments that are in progress in order to respond in a dexterous way to increasing demand. Instead of a conventional way of warehouses and distribution centers, you could manage a supply chain that is constantly in motion, Digital shipping of products with the help of shipping applications, to their final destinations in flexible ways.
Certainly, this way, you will be able to save your warehousing costs, and it will also keep your operations flowing in a smooth manner.
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