September 18th, 2020
The World Moving Forward
At the beginning of 2020, the world was upended with changes to its economics and social life by the arrival of Covid-19, a virus that spread to countries like wild-fire, most were unprepared for it. Fear and confusion led the way, just like the early 2000’s during the early stages of e-commerce, many of us stood still and watched certain industries use e-commerce to generate business and eat away at the expense of more traditional companies. Covid-19 drastically changed the directions of normal activities: social meetings, shopping habits, business settings have now been reduced to online platforms. People were now forced to understand the role that internet technology will play in daily life. Larger numbers of people working and shopping from home than ever before. There is so much difference in activities such as buying hot food, or buying canned food from an online store. As a result, two key industries: express last mile delivery and logistics supply chain are expected to be extremely important aspects in supporting future daily life for many years to come.
Express last mile delivery has really been an important industry that we all have come to rely greatly upon lately, they deliver our hot-food order and all of our anticipated goods, sometimes even arriving at our front doors in less than an hour. While the logistics business is taking a back doors approach role in supplying a necessity to increase the productivity of many industries. Many independent logistics companies also help move a country’s raw materials, semi-finished goods and finished goods into the Domestic and International markets. This industry plays a key role in increasing the competitive power of corporations and revitalizing improvements in a country’s economics scales. However, the competition in the logistics industry is extremely high, for them to survive and provide better services; companies should seek to consolidate and migrate their data into a cloud computing platform service.
With the adaptations into a cloud logistics platform, the traditional logistics roles can begin to expand, minimizing office and operating expense and reducing business risks. Imagine, the number of logistics companies who have committed blocks of space to transporters but end up being unable to fulfill 12-24 hours before departure, or a shipper who is looking to move shipments on a week-end due to a critical shortage in one of their key customer. There are high penalty prices to be absorbed by all parties when shipment capacity is unable to be fulfilled due to a lack of communication and coordination among the companies. These unnecessary risks and wastes of business opportunities can be minimized if information was cleverly integrated-communicated-distributed to its partners in a cloud logistics platform.
New trade and logistics solutions running through a cloud platform have begun with 4 billion smart phone global users, the notion for a business to have only one dedicated trade or logistics partner serving them for many years will need to be re-adjusted in order to provide transparency and better monitoring systems. People and business communities are now demanding convenience in purchasing items from their comfortable homes rather than calling to place an order. We are surrounded by technological inventions all around, created for the benefit of people, to improve our life by increasing productivity and efficiency. With 5G not too far away at a connection 100 times speedier than 4G, our social and business lives will be impacted even further more. Almost all businesses will eventually need to operate on a cloud technology platform to make operations and decision making much more efficient. When trade and logistics are blended into a cloud technology platform, magical moments will definitely happen, with industries moving together with the same interest, we are seeing new ways of getting the job done. Written by: Eddy Syaifulah
