Big data will be a defining force in the future of logistics, but the benefits of big data are already being felt. Before thinking about future possibilities, you need to understand how it is currently being leveraged, According to Katrin Zeiler, supply chain entities will be able to lower overall operating costs, create and test newer business models, develop and maintain a higher standard in customer service and attain unsurpassed efficiency.
If the full organization is involved the following can happen:
- Real Time Route Optimization: delivery routes are dynamically calculated based on delivery sequence, traffic conditions, and recipient status
- Crowd-Based pickup and delivery: a large crowd of occasionally available carriers pick up or deliver shipments along routes they would take anyway
- Strategic Network Planning: Long-term demand forecasts for transport capacity are generated in order to support strategic investments into the network
- Operational Capacity Planning: short and midterm capacity planning allows optimal utilization and scaling manpower and resources
- Customer Loyalty Management: Public customer information is mapped against business parameters in order to predict churn and initiate countermeasures
- Service Improvement and Product Innovation: A comprehensive view on customer requirements and service quality is used to enhance the product portfolio
- Risk Evaluation and Resilience Planning: by tracking and predicting events that lead to supply chain disruptions, the resilience level of transport services is increased
- Marketing Intelligence for SME: Supply chain monitoring data is used to create market intelligence reports for small and mid-sized companies
- Financial Demand and Supply Chain Analytics: a micro-economic view is created on global supply chain data that helps financial institutions improve their rating and investment decisions
- Address Verification: Fleet personnel verifies recipient address verification service provided to retailers and marketing agencies
- Environmental Intelligence: Sensors Attached to delivery vehicles produce fine-meshed statistics on pollution, traffic density, noise, parking spot utilization, etc.