Covid19 and the world of logistics in change

Hi,

with this global crisis caused by the Covid19 pandemic, the world has taken some serious steps in disrupting most of the industries. We have an accelerated development in digitization, which I think evolved this year like 5 years before.

Most will continue to invest and develop this at accelerated rate, as this is the future and it is needed.

One thing every industry needs is logistics. I think there is no industry or I can't think of any where logistics does not play a role. Everything is logistics driven, from production to the own visit at the doctor. Well, if you go to a doctor now, you will see that a lot has changed compared to one year ago. If some has two entries one is turned into an entry and the other into an exit, so that there is less contact between people.

This comes also from factories, where is a material flow and in good organised there is a separate entry and warehouse for incoming goods and one exit and warehouse for delivery products.

I've seen it at work, where we try to have very few inventory on stock, the more we have the higher the costs. During the first months, the supply chain was interrupted as some manufacturing suppliers could not deliver and if they did not deliver, we couldn't deliver and the end customer did not get his part.

This lead of rethinking and we have now second sources to the critical materials. Also a lot of companies are working with consignment warehouses, which are near to the customer, where they ship the parts and the customer takes what it needs. To translate it, we have over production and stuff got more expensive than it used to.

Here the AI can help and have a bigger role. I've been looking at a lot of companies that are tackling this new challenges. Some companies are bringing robots which carry out the parts in the factory. I've been in some factories in Germany where I did only see maintenance technicians. Everything was robotized. Yes, robots are expensive, but the new robots can be reprogrammed and reused for different tasks. There is no need for humans any more in the production process, at least not in the countries where the human over head is expensive.

There are also a lot of startups if self driving trucks, planes or other robots for freight forwarding.

AI can be used to optimize the routes, or to change the times of pickup or delivery to be more efficient.

I think there is also an opportunity for the blockchain technology.

There are some startups that use blockchain for logistics.

Such startups are:

viant.io - USA, NY - models business processes and tracks actvities
cargox.io - Brazil, Sao Paolo - introducing Smart B/L™ documents based on blockchain technology, replacing old-style paper Bill of Lading documents.
xain.io - Germany, Berlin - securing data for the supplychain
dexfreight.io - USA, Sunrise - decentralized logistics platform built on blockchain and machine learning for shippers and carriers, to collaborate and move shipments more efficiently.

There are many more, as I listed only a few.

Do you have any idea for improvement or for a startup?

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