Today, millions of Americans can order products without even having to open the lids of their laptops or take their smartphone out of their pockets. How is that possible and what is a digital package?
How hard can it be? Every time you or your customers have cursed about a delayed delivery, or a worse return, you have indirectly been complaining about bad transport management. That is to say, the lack of functional digital logistics management.
You will most likely be astonished, but positively, if you find yourself in the opposite situation and the delivery service is out of this world.
“Three days ago, Amazon Key was launched, which makes it possible for you as an Amazon Prime-customer to get your packages delivered inside your house when you are not home.”
One of the forces that is pushing the logistics evolution forward is the American e-commerce giant, Amazon. This summer, it launched Amazon Instant Pickup, which makes it possible for Amazon Prime-customers to collect a delivery at one of Amazon’s pick-up locations 30 minutes after placing the order. Three days ago, Amazon Key was launched, which makes it possible for you as a Amazon Prime-customer to get your packages delivered inside your house when you are not home.
As if this was not enough, there is a system for drone deliveries. When the legal obstacles have been cleared, these flying packages are going to revolutionize a large portion of the last-mile distribution, to put it mildly.
“Few Swedish companies and online retailers have the logistical muscles of Amazon. However, that does not mean that they should lower their hopes or expectations. On the contrary.”
Millions of Americans have also bought Amazon Echo with the AI brain Alexa. With Echo, you can order groceries, among other things, “just” by saying what you need straight into the air.
Read more: Does LogTrade Work with Alexa?
Amazon has its own transport management system (TMS). At the same time, the company is striving for a world where it is its own carrier and can eliminate the need for delivery service companies such as UPS and FedEx.
Few Swedish companies and online retailers have the logistical muscles of Amazon. However, that does not mean they should lower their hopes or expectations. On the contrary. If warehouse and delivery management are important parts of the company’s operations, it is wise to look at the spider in the digital information web for shipping, theTMS and invest in a digital logistics system that will give it the same possibility of good deliveries in the long run.
What can Swedish companies in the warehouse industry learn from Amazon?
A package travels across land and sea. How well the journey will go depends on, among other things, how smoothly the shipping information travels through the digital dimensions.
What Amazon has realized is that the key to success is in every single package, not in the large containers and pallets. The information about the individual package, such as where it is going, when it is supposed to be delivered, etc., is to a TMS what electricity is to the engine in a TESLA. It is the power that moves the package forward in as fast and sustainable a way as possible.
We are, however, not talking about one package right now. We are not even talking about all of your deliveries. We are talking about the sum of all your deliveries and “all other packages.”
Ingenious digital logistics software is not only about not having to go to the store. The point of the exceptional delivery service is, among other things, that it makes all packages combined something larger than the individual parts. Because, when all package data are “connected” to the cloud in a smart logistics system, the coordination effects and transport resource efficiency will be enormously improved in the long run.
It makes it possible for optimal delivery service to go hand in hand with a financially and environmentally efficient future. It will mean that the world can say “goodbye” to half-full containers and trucks.
Neither the carrier nor the sender benefits from deliveries that do not hit the end target with the desired precision. Yet it is so easy for errors to occur. And what it all depends on are errors in communication or, to put it technically, in data and information transfer errors.
To understand the power in—and value of—digital logistics management that a logistics system provider offers, one must look at what is under the system’s hood.
At LogTrade, we think that a logistics system should help the user get the most out of the transport- and delivery systems on the market faultlessly. The system should, at the same time, be ready to manage much heavier transport flows and recipient demands than what are customary today. The reason for this is that the logistics flow currently running through the whole delivery chain is facing a digital revolution no one can afford to miss. Digitization is simply the new black—in general, and in the shipping and logistics industry in particular. This is knowledge and possibilities that Amazon does not have sole ownership of.
Do you want to learn more about what you can do to get a step ahead and get as much as possible out of your shipping data? Contact us!