Top Business Trends Dominating the Logistics Industry in 2020

In the last decade, the words innovation and technology have dominated most of the professional sectors, revolutionizing how business is done. However, logistics, has often lagged this revolution. Many companies have preferred to extend the life of their dated technology, often fearful of the challenging implementation or cost associated with upgrading their processes. However, companies are beginning to realize that it is necessary to advance if they want to continue growing and being able to meet the demands of their customers.

Trends in logistics
The customer at the center of the business: One of today’s trends is to personalize both services and products towards the increasingly fickle customer. This is especially true for online businesses, which are exploding in 2020 due to the worldwide pandemic. Many businesses that were not well prepared for such a shock have significantly suffered due to extended supply chains, strained deliveries, and outright logistics failures. Even the best products suffer online if customers have extended wait time to receive their deliveries. This is exactly why Amazon has flourished in this environment because their supply chain was already optimized to perform well under these stresses.

Artificial Intelligence:
AI and machine learning are not just hot topics, but fundamentally gamechangers in the logistics space. The ability to utilize all data, all information across the world-wide web, sifting through what is useful, what is meaningful versus what is misleading or inaccurate is a necessity. Companies like MGN Logistics and their new start-up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, AI Logistics, focus and concentrate on optimizing supply chain outcomes by carefully orchestrating what data is validated and thereby used in their cloud based TMS. MGN Logistics has been at the forefront of deep learning and machine learning since the best part of this past decade, introducing the concept as core fundamentals to their proprietary TMS.
As this trend catches more acceptance, we look forward to seeing the potentially game changing implementations of the future.

IoT solutions (Internet of things):
Closely related to Artificial Intelligence, the internet of things (IoT) includes systems and devices that allow you to do your work more efficiently and flexibly, while being fully connected to the internet and thereby, connected globally. Imagine freight moving from Latin America or China with RFID technology, allowing involved parties to not only know the exact real-time location of the product, but also the temperature, humidity, speed of transportation and duration of stops along the way. All while providing fully integrated tracking and tracing information within your TMS, ERP or WMS. These are not just ideas of the future but rather fully operational module as numerous state-of-the-art TMS systems.

Sustainability:
Care for the environment continues to be a trending hot topic. Sustainability is essential if we want responsible companies committed to the environment and, of course, to its workers. Social responsibility is the balance between the economy and the ecosystems. While environmental sustainability is the equilibrium between business practices and the environment.

Public collection and delivery points:
With the rise of online businesses, social distancing, and the need for touchless deliveries, it is becoming more and more popular to have these types of logistical points. This methodology of delivery allows distributors to deliver product to a secure location at any time while allowing customers to retrieve their product at their own schedule. In addition to reducing pollution, due to less transit, public collection and delivery points allow secured storage, preventing theft.