New dimensions and measures in logistics.

Byline: Nazir Ahmed Shaikh

Today's logistics leaders have to be customer experience leaders. Instead of thinking like operations, they have to play a role of marketer and customer facilitators and prioritize the delivery experience the customer receives. There is a disconnect between the high level ideals of logistics as marketing and the reality that's often in place on the warehouse floor, at the loading dock, and in the front office. The warehouse staff are too flooded with administrative work to bother with providing great service. The majority of communication with customers is through email and over the phone. This is time consuming and painful for your staff and customers alike.

Logistics leaders should then focus on reducing these pain points in their teams by promoting the following:

* Invest in technology

* Reduce complexity

The logistics staff could be more successful by investing in collaborative logistics. This new model for freight technology aims to centralize communication and make the customer experience as effortless as possible through the use of bidirectional customer portals to help end clients track, manage, and confirm accurate delivery of their orders. It would inspires companies to axle from a siloes logistics approach to a unified one around customer experience.

Digitizing the supply chain

It is also critical that today's logistics leaders digitize all aspects of their supply chains. This includes communication, documentation, analytics, and the processes of booking, order, and inventory management. Digitization and customer experience are even intertwined. Digital transformation is the process of using new technologies to create or optimize internal business processes and customer experiences to improve market position and meet business needs.

To digitize the supply chain, one has to do so through the lens of customer experience. Again, these hurdles are the issues of staff being bogged down in manual administrative work, and poor inter-team communication, especially between the front office and the warehouse/loading dock. These obstacles can be worked around though, using digital technologies to improve communication channels and automate manual work.

Operational planning

This is the golden grail of any supply chain operation, a perfect and harmonious combination of perfect operational efficiency and perfect customer satisfaction. However, nobody can perfectly predict buying patterns, supplier timeframes, and carrier or driver rates. Logistics leaders will need to embrace the data revolution and use analytics, KPIs, and AI-powered suggestions to predict buying patterns, identify problematic carriers/drivers and lanes, and estimate order lead times. In a commodity market like logistics, this is what will create the biggest wins - maximized...