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What are the top opportunities for todays logistics providers?

Logistics

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Courtesy of ITU Pictures (Flickr)
Courtesy of ITU Pictures (Flickr)

This is the second post in a series where I discuss the top challenges and most promising opportunities for today’s logistics providers.

I’m labeling the first category of opportunities as “coordination” services.  The new generation of cloud networks can coordinate many internal functions and activities of an LSP’s users and clients, as well as their customer’s  customers and trading partners, giving the entire value chain a “single version of the truth”, but securely packaged and filtered in a way that makes it relevant to each user or enterprise’s individual role.  This not only assures that partners see only their data, it provides the logistics service provider the ability to see across divisions or even clients where appropriate.

With this new network technology, LSPs can monitor and manage all changes and updates without having to be inside anyone’s firewall to do so.  It also enables early identification and communication to those partners impacted to reduce information latency and increase the response time available to react to those changes.

In future posts, I’m going to further explore this theme of LSP challenges and also discuss some of the opportunities that LSPs have to add more value to their customers. If you’re impatient however, I suggest you read the new whitepaper “8 Opportunities for Today’s Logistics Providers“.

For example, an LSP with visibility across a client’s operating divisions would have the ability to identify opportunities to combine movements or better utilize private fleet or dedicated assets to drive down costs and/or improve utilization.  At the same time, there could be additional savings generated by exposing the availability of those assets to other clients with compatible loads and/or lanes.

The fact is, today’s event management and decision support tools cannot scale to allow users to be involved in continuously planning millions of item and location combinations.

The fact is, today’s event management and decision support tools cannot scale to allow users to be involved in continuously planning millions of item and location combinations.  That’s why a key feature of the new cloud platforms is horizontal grid processing, which gives them the ability to manage the millions of daily transactions and tracking events that today’s large value chains generate.  Given that most of these events are routine it they therefore enable individual roles and users to subscribe to specific alert notifications utilizing a configurable alert framework.  Furthermore a permissibility layer controls what individual users can see down to the field level as well as their permitted activities and approval levels.  Providing these well profiled exceptions to an LSP’s clients as well as their partners represents something not available from their own internal ERP systems.  It may also represent a capability their client’s partners desire for their other customers or their own suppliers/partners.

In future posts, I’m going to continue to discuss some of the opportunities that LSPs have to add more value to their customers. If you’re impatient however, I suggest you read the new whitepaper “8 Opportunities for Today’s Logistics Providers“.

Gene Trousil
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