3x digitalisation in the transport industry.

People currently working in the transport industry are sure to be familiar with some of the challenges brought about by technological evolutions in the sector. We’re referring here to changing expectations from customers and suppliers, remote working, disruptions within the global logistics chain, and so on.

One additional common factor is that today’s transport industry doesn’t always recognise the potential offered by paperless working, especially in comparison with other industries. Employees typically do a lot of manual and repetitive work, which requires a high degree of concentration and is very time-consuming, and ultimately results in them not working to their full potential and making mistakes. This, in turn, leads to added costs for your company.

In order to safeguard your company’s profitability, it’s important to find good solutions to all of these challenges, and automation and digitalisation are an essential part of this. What solutions will you use in your transformation to ‘logistics 4.0’?

1. smart scanners to simplify your administration
2. optimised data and reporting
3. optimised shipment planning and tracking

1. smart scanners to simplify your administration

Invoices, contracts, waybills… lots of different documents are sent – both physically and by email – between various departments every day. Data from these documents is then collected, entered elsewhere or converted.

The latest techniques for automatically scanning documents offer you benefits in terms of processing time and correctness of information. Advanced solutions that use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or – a step further – Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) can even interpret (handwritten) text on scanned images.

And these solutions incorporate machine learning and require minimal intervention from your employees. After all, the software can:

• recognise documents in different formats
• pick out the right information
• process this data and save it in the right systems and databases

You can then further expand these systems as soon as they become operational, so you can combine them with digital archiving systems to easily find all your documents again, e.g. for an audit. Or you might prefer to add a qualified information management system to automatically approve related documents, such as shipping or customs documents and contracts... the possibilities are almost endless.

2. optimised data and reporting

Your company is sure to have a wealth of data available. But do you actually do anything with it? Interactive and proactive dashboards expose trends and pain points, so you can make the right strategic decisions for your business and reduce risks. And the path to these predictive analyses is shorter than you might think.

RPA bots, for example, automatically collect data from various sources. This might involve (historical) data relating to prices, shipments, stock levels, transport equipment, and so on.

If you then combine this with artificial intelligence (AI), you can make certain predictions that can serve as the basis for adjusting your business operations. A few specific examples:

• You gain insights into customer or market demands, and can anticipate peaks and downturns, or even tap into new markets. These insights also help you to determine your pricing strategy.  
• If you know when transport or warehouse equipment, for example, is expected to fail or become defective, you can plan servicing and maintenance in advance accordingly, which greatly benefits your supply chain efficiency.  
• Being aware of any bottlenecks in your various routes helps you to optimise your itineraries based on data about accidents, congestion, weather, etc. – leading to a significant reduction in fuel consumption and emissions.

3. optimised shipment planning and tracking

Customers increasingly expect goods to be delivered faster, and also correctly. They rely on clear and consistent track and trace, good communication, and perfect administrative processing. And in order to guarantee all this, you need to plan and monitor all your shipments as accurately as possible.

Solutions that use artificial intelligence, machine learning and the Internet of Things allow you to:

• have an overview of equipment and products in your warehouse at all times
• automatically allocate work orders in the warehouse
• track the movement of goods in the warehouse on a low-cost basis
• automatically extract specific shipping requirements from applications
• know exactly what goods are in which transport equipment
• get shipments to customers faster by calculating the best possible routes
• track transport equipment by GPS and keep customers informed about shipments
• use a chatbot to reply to recurring standard queries and so relieve pressure on your customer service department
• receive notifications of receipts and payments

Initiatives such as these provide insights into the supply chain with real-time information about shipments, so you can easily identify and address any potential sticking points. This ensures a smooth process that is as short as possible, which of course improves your customers’ trust in you and avoids unnecessary costs.

discover more customised features.

Just like various other sectors, the transport industry uses legacy systems and applications that are no longer aligned with current trends and markets. But reshaping the application landscape is not an easy task, especially as it often involves business-critical applications, with security as a top priority. It’s still definitely worth taking a close look at digitisation and automation software and systems, however.

Automation can really drive your business forward. It saves manual work, reduces the risk of human error, and improves the entire supply chain and your customer service! But setting sail on an automation journey typically raises a number of questions:

• How can you know which solutions you need?
• How do you then implement them in your organisation?
• What about support afterwards, for example if updates are needed or you want to scale the solution?
• How can I continue to interact with complex legacy systems in a simple way?

An experienced technology partner with sound business knowledge can answer questions such as these! Together with you, we work out what you want to achieve and why you want to address certain challenges. Our teams usually start by developing an integrated solution for one particular business-critical process before rolling out that successful outcome further to other departments. This ensures the final solution is fully aligned with you and your customers’ expectations.