The Industrial Revolution brought with it a new era of business. Industrialists decided which jobs were essential and which could be replaced with machinery. This affected how products were manufactured and distributed, and laid to rest old tools and introduced new technologies.

A new revolution is upon us, and it’s transforming the supply chain industry. With the Internet of things, advanced robotics, and the application of big data, today’s supply chain providers are deploying sensors, creating networks, and trying to automate everything.

At Choice Logistics we are developing innovative technologies to advance and empower our supply chain services, and we continue to challenge ourselves to push the envelope with how we leverage technology.

Here are some ways innovation is – or could transform global logistics.

• Greater Velocity. Imagine a customer shipment that is already in route before it’s ordered. Enabled by advanced forecasting, predictive analytics, and product demand data, a new service could emerge called “predictive shipping.” Products could ship toward a particular region, be matched with an immediate need and routed to a customer destination.
• Greater Collaboration. Timing is critical. In the world of urgent spare parts, optimizing the arrival time of the part and the Field Technician can be a significant factor in satisfying customer service level agreements and managing costs. Collaborative mobile applications which reflect shared GPS locations and real time ETAs, with the ability to directly contact all relevant parties would help.
• Greater Efficiency. Even when urgent parts arrive at a customer location on time, there can still be delays onsite. By leveraging third party geographic data and historical order data, we can create “location profiles”. These profiles include address attributes, such as an “urban high rise building” or “large rural facility”, and the additional challenges of transporting inventory into these location types, such as the different kinds of building security. Estimated time of delivery algorithms for urgent shipments are adjusted to include the location profile which optimizes the receiving process timeline.
• Greater Accuracy. What if everyone participating in a supply chain were making decisions based upon the same data? The integration of data from suppliers, service providers, and transportation carriers into a “supply chain data cloud” ensures all stakeholders make better, more unified and consistent decisions. As a logistics service and data integrator, we are establishing a single source of data to drive our supply chain services and reflect a centralized view with consolidated real-time metrics.
• Greater Mobility. Remote. Remote. Remote. More and more there is need to manage the supply chain via mobile applications. Suppliers, distributors, customers, carriers, and technicians are now more remote, and can be constantly moving. Creating and tracking orders, managing inventory and connecting with each other in real time via mobile technologies is becoming a basic requirement.

Technology is now at the core of innovation. At Choice Logistics we are considering all options to best manage our supply chain services, now and in the future. We are laying the foundation by engineering our proprietary and integrated technologies to support new and future innovations. Technology is at the center of everything we do, and is the source of ultimate transformation.