DIGITALISATION

Over the last forty years, logistics has undergone a huge change: from being a purely operational function dealing with transport and warehousing operations that reported to sales or manufacturing and focused on ensuring the timely delivery to customers or production lines, to an independent supply chain management function that in most large companies is led by a Vice President Supply Chain. The focus of the supply chain management function has shifted to complex, long-term collaboration agreements and advanced planning processes and systems, such analytical demand planning and integrated S&OP, while storage and order fulfilment operations have often been outsourced to third-party Logistics Service Providers. There are several trends that have a strong influence on supply chain design: changing demographics that lead to reduced labour availability,  off shoring and back-reshoring options, that change the global manufacturing footprint, customer expectations linked to the online trend of the last twenty years have led to increasing expectations in terms of delivery times combined with an extreme granularization of orders. To cope with the requirements of this changing scenario, supply chains need to become much faster, more capable and precise. Digital technologies offer opportunities to approach such a change. Digitalization means transforming analog processes into digital ones, consolidating data from multiple internal and external sources, integrates IoT, advanced robotics, and big data analytics to enhance connectivity and agility. Projects like the adoption of autonomous vehicles  in warehouses, factories, hospitals and other confined plants; the adoption of automated warehouses and picking systems and the optimization of demand planning algorithms and systems are just a short list of the many tasks that SOGENET approached together with its customers. Capturing value through supply chain digitalization is a journey that can start right now. SOGENET can help you understand the degree of digital maturity of your current supply chain and organization and help you to reach higher performance levels.