This week myself and our COO Glyn Royles have been attending the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) Annual Conference. It’s been a regular fixture in our calendars for quite a few years as it’s a great opportunity to catch up with supply chain leaders from across the US and keep up with the latest hot topics in our industry.
Once again the agenda has been packed with sessions providing practical advice about dealing with the many challenges that transport operations face every day including:
All of these challenges drive more strategic thinking and usually lead to logistics and supply chain professionals questioning how technology can help. This year we’ve seen pilots of self-driving vehicles and plenty about the use of drones for last mile delivery, as well as increasing use of software to automate every stage of the order fulfillment process.
The need for end-to-end visibility across the supply chain is something that we discuss a lot here at Paragon, especially when we are talking to customers about our last mile order fulfillment system Paragon HDX. This modular system allows retailers to track goods entering consolidation hubs from multiple different manufacturers, track goods item by item as they are consolidated into customer orders, track orders when they leave the depot via courier or own fleet vehicles and then track them back again into the supply chain if the customer returns the goods.
We understand that everybody will be at a different stage of their evolution so Paragon HDX scales up to provide retailers with the functionality to complement the systems they already have. Irrespective of the number of modules a customer needs, it provides the same joined up view of the order fulfillment process helping retailers to reduce costs and improve the customer experience.
To find out more about, you can have a look at our Paragon HDX pages or check out what Talking Logistics’ Adrian Gonzalez has to say about it in his recent Talking Logistics blog.
Transportation and logistics have long been seen as cost centers that add little value to the customer proposition but the role of delivery services is changing. Today if the last mile delivery service is a bad customer experience, money invested in everything leading up to the last mile is wasted.
In the last 12 months we have seen some really very disruptive technologies and businesses changing the way the industry operates. Typically it’s the need to meet growing customer demands or reduce operational costs that is driving these innovations, for example Uber, or the growing connectivity between devices (often referred to as the Internet of Things) that will result in devices like fridges that can monitor when we’re running out of milk and tell us we need to buy more when we’re stood in the grocery store. Looking forward to the next 12 months, it will be interesting to see what new technologies are introduced both here in the US and across the rest of the world. CSCMP 2016 has served to remind us all that it’s a very exciting industry to be part of.
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