Do you know what one of the most significant productivity gains in freight and logistics over the last 25 years has been? Two computer monitors are used.
Many firms were disturbed when we went into lockdown because they had to manage their PDF documents, Excel spreadsheets, and freight software on a single screen on a laptop or home PC. We’re a resilient bunch, so we figured out a method to make it work. Personal protective equipment and other necessities continued to move, and we found new ways to move freight in the most complex and challenging situation any of us has ever encountered.
It’s been difficult dealing with this mess, from manufacturing closures to port congestion, capacity constraints, and soaring freight charges. We’re not going back, despite the promise of economic recovery and a return to “normal.” The expectations of consumers and businesses in terms of transparency, agility, and adaptability have evolved. We’ll never be able to go back to paper-based systems, PDFs, or Excel spreadsheets.
The good news is that we don’t have to return to that inefficient and out-of-date hellscape where supply chain visibility was limited, and systems were handled on paper. We won’t have to set up twin monitors to pay brilliant individuals to spend their days converting data from one format to another while tracking spreadsheets between factories and warehouses.
We have the chance to do better. None of this is new: real-time visibility, digitization, dynamic pricing, and port congestion. These successive crises have merely hastened the long-term industry trends we’ve been observing.
So, where do we go from here? As executives in our companies, we need to sit together and layout strategies for 2022 and 2023, intending to turn the triage work we’ve done into long-term results.
We need to assess the innovations that our teams came up with while in crisis mode and figure out how to turn them into long-term improvements in business processes. We can look at the new technologies we rushed into and figured out how to better integrate them into our legacy ecosystems. We can use the knowledge that consumer expectations have shifted to figure out how to provide shippers with more brand-affirming data so that they can deliver an exceptional e-commerce experience.
Longing for the pre-COVID era isn’t going to cut it. Shippers will not tolerate it. They’ll demand more transparency, open integrations, and real-time access to high-quality data.
Shippers have seen what their supply chains can and should look like, and they’re heading in that direction. They’re looking to their suppliers and the market for solutions to keep these problems from entangling their companies and supply chains. Customers’ strategies and operations will no longer include service suppliers who do not share that goal.
Shippers should be aware that more and more occurrences will endanger their supply chains and product delivery, as should carriers and freight forwarders. COVID-19 is not, first and foremost, over. We’ve made significant progress, but with the pandemic, we’re still navigating our way out of the woods. Almost every company’s supply chain and delivery network are still under a lot of stress and uncertainty.
Second, for nearly a decade, at least one big disruptive supply chain event has occurred every year. Do you recall the effects of the so-called arctic vortex in early 2014? Or the dockworkers’ weeks-long strike at 29 West Coast ports in early 2015? Then there were the hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017, as well as the escalating trade conflict with China, economic expansion, and the 2018 “bomb cyclone.” Even in 2020 and 2021, when COVID interruptions were the focus of shippers’ attention, there were occurrences like the Texas freeze in February, which created weeks of transportation capacity issues, and the mega-containership Ever Given’s blockade of the Suez Canal.
Finally, our planet has an estimated population of 8 billion people, excluding natural calamities, pandemics, and labor disputes. We are a part of a global trade network that is more complicated than anything ever existed in human history.
So here’s what we do: we take a deep breath and examine our entire digital nervous system to see how it’s evolved as a result of these escalating crises. Then we attempt to reintegrate that nervous system into our baseline to establish a long-term, operationally effective, and forward-thinking growth platform.
We could also purchase everyone a third monitor.
