The world is becoming more and more interconnected with every new day, and the global trade and flow of products are dependent on transportation services. Every product in our surroundings from garments to electronic gadgets is brought from various areas across the globe.
With the destruction caused by the recent pandemic, all industries worldwide including the transportation and logistics industry were exposed to health and financial risks. A few organizations are as yet recovering from the pandemic’s harms.
All this increased the pressure on the transportation and logistics industry with everyone wanting a secure and smooth transit as well as safe and on-time delivery of their products.
HOW DID DIGITIZATION HELP?
Under such circumstances, the incorporation of technology in the transportation and logistics sectors has enabled organizations to improve the quality of their services.
Logistics and transportation businesses are embracing technological advancement and many logistics operatives expect technology to provide greater visibility and to convey huge efficiency gains. Digitization assists organizations to upgrade the entire customer experience, with AI reasoning and MI solutions at the core of that.
IMPORTANCE OF DIGITAL TRENDS
The coming years are expected to see a tremendous expansion in digitization inside the transportation and logistics industry. These businesses are investing in technology to:
- Expand customers’ reach
- Add efficiency
- Improve speed
- Reduce the time of services
- Work for customers’ loyalty
- Increase revenue
It is the way towards using technology to create new or make changes to current frameworks, business strategies, and client experience to meet changing business and market necessities. Digitization in the transportation and logistics industry can be applied on the:
- organizational level
- business operational level
- Domain level
- Strategic model
How about we take a look at what makes up effective digitalization? These are the top ten digital trends in the realm of transportation and logistics:
Artificial intelligence
The potential for AI in logistics is amazing. A supply chain network has to deal with unimaginable sizes of both structured and unstructured data. Artificial intelligence has prompted the innovation of:
- Electric trucks
- Autonomous vehicles
- GPS
- Blockchain
- 3-D printing
- Cloud technology
- platooning
Artificial intelligence has empowered organizations to access required data that might comprise payment information, dates, partners, addresses, and so on from anywhere whenever they want.
By assessing and organizing this data, recognizing designs, and generating reports, freight forwarding companies can significantly improve operational efficiency. It assists transportation organizations in:
- Dealing with the traffic
- Assessing any threats
- Planning the framework
- Employing autonomous technology in their operations
How does it benefit organizations?
Numerous instances of how AI is beneficial for transportation businesses can already be seen. Natural Language Processing can help organizations:
- Pinpoint inconsistencies in invoices
- Predict shipping delays
- Deal with shipping risks
The AI-equipped vehicles can help drivers analyze the route conditions and share information with other vehicles as well through V2V communication.
Machine learning
With the help of algorithms, Machine Learning can assist organizations with discovering repeated patterns in supply chain networks. This information helps them achieve a competitive edge in the market as it talks about the major components that affect the success of their company.
These patterns can identify inventory levels, quality of products, predicting the orders, strategizing manufacturing, managing transportation, analyzing shipping costs, and minimizing or averting shipping risks.
ML assists logistics organizations in making decisions by predicting the future requirements and demands for new items. It has made the supply chain network an easy process and has amplified the assets by reducing the cost and time spent on achieving transparency.
Blockchain
Blockchain is based on cryptography and is one of the most amazing technologies to be used in transportation and logistics businesses. Some of the ways it can help organizations are:
- Diminishing the chances of fraud or cheating
- Preventing bottlenecks and errors
- Improving efficiency and security
- Recording financial exchanges
- Preventing data manipulation
- Tracking assets
- Sharing real-time information
- Saving time
- Delivering better customer services
- Adding transparency
With its help, the accuracy in the operations can be ensured. It saves all data related to financial transactions and assists in making smart agreements.
It also helps logistics organizations to monitor freight limits and determine the cost based on the volume of the freight and has the ability to bring transparency into operations.
Internet of Things
The Internet of Things has transformed transportation frameworks. With IoT, communication can be improved to an entirely another level. It has enabled organizations to achieve enhanced communication with transportation mediums, including trains, trucks, and planes, ships, etc. Some of its benefits include:
- Assist with anticipating shipping time more precisely with constant updates
- Predict delays and assist in overcoming such situations
- Save time
Safety of customers and products
With sensors on the trucks or buses, IoT helps to ensure the safety of the customers traveling and products being delivered. Data gathered from IoT devices gives the organizations information on the driving quality of drivers regarding overspeeding or any rule-breaking. It also analyzes the condition of the vehicles and indicates if something goes wrong.
GPS and RFID
IoT tracking instruments assist organizations to become more efficient and earn more profit. IoT offers practical solutions to transportation issues. GPS and RFID are both IoT devices.
With these IoT gadgets, transportation and logistics organizations gain visibility over the freight movement. These devices also provide real-time data that helps organizations deal with uncertain situations.
Identifying threats & freight limit
The online devices enable the smart gathering of data and enable vehicles to spot the hurdles and distinguish between pedestrians and vehicles ahead, and alerts vehicles and trucks of potential obstacles during travel.
Internet-of-things (IoT) sensors can assist with identifying the space a specific package takes. This information can be used to compute the shipment cost.
M2M collaboration
M2M communications happen on three levels which are:
- Machine to man
- Machine to machine
- Machine to mobile applications
Machine to machine
The transportation business incorporates transport mediums, like land transportation, rail, marine, and air transport. Trucks and buses come at the top with respect to technological progress. The boost in the popularity of trucks and buses means that the rising interest for cargo and traveler transport is also increasing.
Owing to this demand, in the coming years, logistics and supply chain organizations are thinking to move to a higher degree of machine-to-machine communications to build effectiveness, security, tracking, analyzing data, availability, and cooperation for the transportation business. It can likewise assist with tracking logistics and reducing costs.
Autonomous vehicles
Autonomous vehicles have taken a critical role in the logistics and transportation business, and the day isn’t far away when the entire transportation system would become autonomous.
Although autonomous trucks aren’t very popular yet and still need to be approved for urban traffic, we do get to see forklifts generally utilized in distribution centers, air terminals, ports, and so forth with robot arms in warehouses.
What’s more, we will soon see autonomous trucks on the streets, conveying products via automatic forklifts and loaded in warehouses.
V2V Communication
Vehicle-to-vehicle correspondences will permit autonomous trucks to form a fleet, where numerous trucks drive closer together to reduce cost. This has the capacity to reduce the cost spent on fuel by as much as 30%.
Hyperloop
Soon hyperloop transportation systems which can facilitate frictionless travel in a decompressed tube are likely to take over the transportation and logistics industries for fast transits.
Autonomous ships
The ships are also now expected to be equipped with autonomous technology which can save them from accidents from human blunders that account for almost 70% of the total accidents on the sea.
Electric trucks
With a developing pattern of migration, from rural to metropolitan regions all throughout the planet, the demand for public vehicles is developing. A large portion of the city’s transports and buses are diesel-driven, which increases the measure of CO2 emanations.
In order to combat the climate crisis and reduce CO2 emissions, many countries are investing resources into electric trucks. For instance, Tesla’s electric trucks not only come with autopilot features but also have zero-emission levels.
Cloud technology
Cloud innovation is perhaps the greatest innovation in the transportation business. By incorporating cloud technology in transportation and logistics, associations can accomplish operational effectiveness. Cloud computing helps associations in:
- Constant vehicle tracking
- Logistics space management
- Handling online tickets
- Providing organizations with real-time data
- Save data without using any external storage
As information moves to the cloud, logistics IT administrations are getting accessible on a flexible, on-request model.
Sustainability
Sustainable measures in transport and logistics management can help in
- Controlling environment changes
- Reducing water pollution
- Decrease global warming
- Reviving good air quality
More and more organizations are now going for sustainable transportation solutions and reduce carbon footprint through
- Driverless truck platooning
- Electric vehicles
- Using eco-friendly devices
Visibility
The development of the current transportation and logistics system revolves around the visibility feature. Visibility is one of the main digital trends in the logistics and transportation industry.
One of the new improvements in this field is the anti-robbery GPS, which enables officials to arrive at the exact position of the trucks or buses. This innovation is helping associations to avoid losses.
