In general, increasing globalization and constantly increasing demand are already leading to bottlenecks in the industry. In addition, pandemic-related production and delivery delays, container congestion, growing e-commerce activities across the board, and the war-related explosion in energy costs are increasing the risk and pressure on the industry. Also due to the acute shortage of skilled workers (especially in the area of drivers), these risks are increasing more and more.
In order to be able to cope with these global challenges, the industry is forced to think "out of the box" and to look for solutions to be able to defy all adversities.
We then considered how supply chains can be made more sustainable, robust and efficient. Here we focus on 5 parameters.
Ultimately, a similar level of transparency is also expected in the B2B area today, as has long been the case in the B2C area, i.e. the customer must be able to reliably check the status of his order online at all times.
Here it is important that everyone involved in the process chain pulls together and sees transparency as a common task or challenge.
With the exception of a few pilot projects, automation currently ends at the sender's ramp, since the infrastructure for autonomous vehicles has not yet been created. If these conditions are met, issues such as driver bottlenecks, rest periods, etc. can increasingly take a back seat and the supply chains can be relieved in the long term.
Conceivable here are both cooperations among service providers (e.g. bundling of the main runs), the increased generation of "round trips" (= combination of deliveries and collections) or also so-called shipper cooperations (i.e. shippers from the same region with identical recipient groups bundle for their own intention the volume).
All those involved in an "end2end" supply chain (including logistics as the "executing element") must, in contrast to today's requirement profile, simultaneously focus on the maximum utilization of capacities, the reduction of empty kilometers and the increase in transparency on the transport route. At the moment there are certainly only very few specialists who have mastered this combined role and who are equipped with the appropriate skills and influence.
In order to be able to implement this change, one's own interests must take second place to network interests, i.e. purchasing no longer buys "all-inclusive" free domicile, different companies in the region with the same customers or focal points in the delivery regions negotiate together with a forwarding agent and no longer alone with different carriers, trade allows the informal harmonization of delivery days and much more.
Conserving the available resources, protecting the environment as much as possible and optimizing the supply chains (such consolidations free up capacities in a sustainable and plannable manner) is therefore a feasible goal, but not alone.
A "creative" head of logistics put it in a nutshell many years ago when he said: "The competition takes place on the shelves and not on the ramp". To remember such a "succinct" sentence under today's conditions and to think creatively about whether and with whom one could go such a path together would certainly be the first important step towards optimization.
Our expertise is cross-industry - food, beverage and pharmaceuticals.
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dbackhausen@bavaria-group.com |