Envisioning the future of industry with future of technologies-Part 2: Digital distribution and logistics
For most manufacturing or CPG firm’s, the last mile visibility is still a major problem organizations are working to fix.
A large bike manufacturer was concerned his only connect with the customers are through the dealers and was looking to engage with customers real time directly. A fertilizer manufacturer wished he understood the local sales patterns real time based on weather & sowing conditions to manage his FG inventory better. A cycle manufacturer realized his latest launch variant was not moving well in one location and could have shifted inventory with another location that was selling fast, missed opportunity with lack of real time data.
Real time view of sales is an opportunity for lean and agile enterprises to focus through digital. I recently floated this scenario on an ideation platform to crowd source some thoughts. One of the few great ideas that came was simple QR code solution, block chain and digital ewallets linking sale data incentivized with direct promotions to customers and loyalty programs
Leading the future of industry conversations from the digital sales in my earlier post upstream to digital distribution and logistics to exploring possibilities
- A supply work bench (coordinated with the sales workbench) leveraging data on last mile consumption, promotions, weather, demand, location, inventory, estimated delivery and Available to Promise (ATP) to coordinate supplies to retail stores – (New Technology – control towers connected with enterprise IT , Advanced analytics AI and ML , weather data , GPS )
- Sales representative or local employees capturing digital data of store and back store inventory for back end inventory estimation using auto pattern recognition , pushing real time demand and inventory data to the manufacturers for real time orders net of available stock – ( New technology – Artificial intelligence, image sensing, Optical character recognition (OCR) , visual and advanced analytics , geo positioning/geo tagging)
- Direct store delivery scheduler app coordinating store deliveries and orders , proof of delivery (New technology – Mobility , remote printing )
- Autonomous warehouse and distribution center with auto sorting and tagging, picking and packing , auto stocking and remote ordering, digital training for staff – attrition is a problem here (New Technology – Voice Pick , QR codes and guides, KIVA robots and driverless fleets, RFID scanner , augmented reality , advanced analytics and ML)
- Fleet scheduling, traffic management & routing , location tracking and monitors , navigators and optimizers for delivery of goods, shrinkage , load & network optimization, delivery confirmation , proof of delivery, cluster routing , drop ship, break bulk and merge in transit ( New Technology – Geo positioning, Geo fencing, RFID, AI and machine learning algorithms, supply chain control towers , Telematics , Advanced analytics – optimization and recommendation engines, weather data, fleet aggregator market places, mobility, cloud, social media communication )
Looking forward to seeing these integrated digital use cases deployed in the industry processes, bringing in new business models with breakthrough operational efficiencies and newer experiences for customers.
