TECHNOLOGIES IN SUPPORT OF LOGISTICS TO MONITOR, TRACK AND OPTIMIZE THE MANAGEMENT OF GOODS

Logistics is evolving, becoming more and more “smart”. To understand the importance of an effective and efficient management of the entire supply chain is enough to think about the fact that the 90% of the products that we purchase and consume are transported and transferred more and more times on one side to the other of the Planet. It appears therefore evident the increasing need for companies to have adequate and technologically advanced tools to be able to intelligently monitor both inbound and outbound goods traffic, to optimize the speed and quality of shipments and to eliminate problems related to fraud and counterfeiting. In other words, with increasing business complexity and with the change of consumer purchasing behavior, more oriented toward the “omnichannel” select, has increased the complexity of logistic systems that require increasingly higher levels of automation to optimize the choice of decision makers.

The technology therefore has the task of supporting the logistics: management information system, Business Analytics and Business Intelligence applications allow to analyze the data, interpret the performance, schedule activities and predict possible future scenarios giving an important contribution in decision making characterized by uncertainty. However, in order to succeed it is necessary to overcome two obstacles which are closely linked to the intrinsic characteristics of logistics activities that requires the presence of multiple actors because many parts of the process are delegated. The first challenge to overcome is to be able to make data available that normally the various actors involved keep jealously guarded to avoid losing their competitive advantage. Once we had the data, to be able to interpret them in generating useful information is necessary to overcome a second obstacle: to make data from diverse sources homogenized.

What seems clear is therefore that technology can do so much to support a “smart” logistics management but must be accompanied by a change in the behavior of the actors involved. It is no longer enough the support of a system integrator capable of helping companies during the digital transformation, able to make to work together different tools and to redesign the processes (from document management to BI and to the entire technology infrastructure), but it is necessary to foster a culture of continuous improvement, to strengthen the relationships and to increase the sharing of the information.