Category Archives: Technology

Sharing the perils associated with paper, Amar More, CEO, Kale Logistics Solutions calls paper just not a piece, it means delays, environmental damage and in some places it means corruption. He continued, “India is a big success story, we have come to sixth rank globally from 116. Our country is the world’s IT backbone and we should not be following the world; however, we should be leading the world. In our industry, the time is now and we shouldn’t be wasting this opportunity considering paper not only delays and damages but with COVID-19 it is a death threat because the virus stays on paper for three to four days. So, if we are handling more paper, we are putting our own staff and industry at more risk. Hence, we should use technology not just for paperless operations but contactless.”

Amit Malakar, Chief Customer Officer, Welspun One talks about the lessons to be learnt from the pandemic at CargoTalk’s fourth digital conclave. He says, “COVID-19 has taught us few things, such as, how important it is to be digital in our business, consumer’s direct connection to brand and having multiple stock points rather than one to fulfil the demand quicker, to name a few. We have realised that industry players with robust supply chains and those who were well stocked and well replenished were the ones who survived. Calling logistics industry an important contributor to our economy, he continues, “There has been a lot of talk about warehouse consolidation over the last five years and now the government is also keen and trying to reduce some cost of supply chain. The warehousing industry has also got infrastructure status. Hence, things are moving in the positive direction in this industry.”

Sharing the challenging times given by COVID-19, Naveen Rawat, Director & Co-founder, Holisol Logistics, at CargoTalk’s fourth digital conclave says, “Things have started looking better especially on the e-commerce side. For many of our customers for whom e-commerce was just a secondary channel and their primary channel was selling from their stores have now realised that e-commerce is not a filler but a very important part of their business. In the last four to six weeks the business has gone up to 50 per cent from a single digit market share of e-commerce. Rawat is sure that this change is not only a temporary measure but even as and when things go back to normal, e-commerce would still be an important kind of channel for them. The growth percentage might not stay at 50 per cent but it will not go into single digit and will definitely not go back to pre-COVID level.

According to V Raju, Senior Vice President CL – Chemical, Pharma & Food Sector, Avvashya CCI Logistics (All Cargo Group), “COVID-19 has only created disruptions for us in the supply chain and logistics and we need to learn to live in an uncertain world. Today the warehousing and last-mile distribution occupies such an important part in the entire supply chain management. What is more important for all the stakeholders to think about it is how can they modernise and digitalise their existing systems such that the manual intervention becomes the least.” He expresses his views at CargoTalk’s fourth digital conclave. “Let us talk about the introduction of Warehouse Management System (WMS) in warehouses so that we can find out the exact location of cargo and also plan our receipts and delivery and inventory management in time with the help of these WMSs.”

Keeping it simple in terms of what COVID-19 has done and what contactless means, Satish Lakkaraju, Chief Commercial Officer, Agility Logistics at CargoTalk’s fourth digital conclave says, “It’s clearly visible from the way we have been doing meetings in the past and how are we interacting now. It’s only operations that have still been on ground but the rest of the things are now contactless.” He continues, “It is highly encouraging to see government initiatives on digitalisation and contactless movement. In the past, our fear used to be that government is slow to react but for the first time customs is the least painful department to deal with as far as logistics is concerned.”

In order to enable customers with supply chain solutions on Google Cloud, o9 Solutions has announced a strategic partnership with Google Cloud. The new partnership extends the reach of o9 to companies looking to transform their capabilities around demand sensing and forecasting, supply chain planning, assortment planning, integrated business planning and more with the global infrastructure and deployment options that Google Cloud enables. The wide-ranging partnership will specifically target leading retail, consumer product manufacturer and telecom companies with unique capabilities to scale with o9 and Google Cloud. “The COVID-19 crisis has exposed significant weaknesses in how organisations run their value chains today,” said Igor Rikalo, President & COO, o9 Solutions. Data remains critical for effective planning, and Google Cloud’s data sources and scalability are key to deal with this new level of complexity. In addition, o9’s Enterprise Knowledge Graph (ie Digital Brain) is able to convert data (structured and unstructured, external and internal) to actionable insights to drive improved decision making.

Emphasising on community systems or common platforms for the industry where no one needs to share paper anywhere Amar More, CEO, Kale Logistics Solutions, said, “The exchange of data through these community platforms replaces paper. Secondly, to avoid congestion, one needs to inform the airport in advance about the time of truck arrival and do the documentation beforehand and not at the airport. This will not only help in avoiding congestion but also help in operating in a safer and efficient manner. Finally, for the industry to come out of this shock, we definitely need technologies that can help them reduce cost or earn more revenues.” On available technologies, he said, “The most pertinent technology is community platforms where we are replacing human interaction and paper with digital interaction. And, once we adopt them, the benefits are tremendous in terms of cost saving, customer satisfaction and transparency. I believe the time has come to adopt these technologies and to declare this war on paper.”

FarEye has raised an additional US$ 13 million as an extension to its Series D investment led by The Fundamentum Partnership and KB Global Platform Fund. The investment will accelerate company’s global expansion to address the steepening digital curve for logistics transformation. The need is being further accelerated by enterprises and end consumers demanding a high level of transparency, faster and more convenient delivery experiences. There is also an increased need for flexible supply chains to meet these demands. “We are seeing a surge in the need for real-time visibility in logistics for businesses to build customer-centric supply chains. With recently raised funds, we will continue to invest in the best talent in the Americas, Europe, and APAC to support our hyper-growth in these regions. With a vision to make FarEye one of the most customer-centric organizations globally, we aim to make every delivery delightful for the consumers.” said Kushal Nahata, CEO, FarEye.

Explaining the importance of digitising the processes, Parvinder Singh, Managing Director, Hans Infomatic,says, ”Many companies still have problems coming to grips with the concept, but there is no way for them to avoid digitisation. It is important for companies to understand that digitisation will only be successful if the cloud and IoT solutions are secure and facilitate privacy of their corporate and customer data. So be it securing data, file management system, HR management, employees performances or booking orders & fulfilling them and all major financial transactions including invoicing and receipt generation, everything is going to be digital and handled from remote areas. Hans Infomatic is committed to helping organisations stay connected; and facilitating remote access to information while being productive during such challenging times.”

Talking about what government has done or what can we expect from the government to do, Keku Bomi Gazder, CEO, AAICLAS stressed on how CBIC has enabled the faceless and paperless evaluation of our shipments. Considering the two portals that the Ministry of Civil Aviation has rolled out almost two years ago and how ICEDASH has improved the monitoring of customs clearance of imported goods, the government is faster than the private sector in digitisation. He believes, “It is more for us in the industry to keep up with the government rather than asking what the government can do.”