Joe DeLuca has joined the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) as director of marketing. DeLuca, a 30-year veteran of the marketing, advertising, and communications professions, was most recently director of product marketing at Con-way. In his new role at CSCMP, DeLuca will oversee all global marketing and communications strategies, branding, collaborative membership initiatives, and public and media relations for the worldwide logistics industry association.
Softeon, a supply chain software specialist, has hired Nancy Malone as vice president of sales. She brings more than 20 years of experience to her new position, including time spent working at MARCGlobal (now RedPrairie) and Philips Consumer Electronics.
William Ostermeyer is the new director of sales at viastore systems. He comes to viastore from Prostaff Logistics, where he served as vice president of operations. Previously, Ostermeyer worked at Swisslog as vice president of sales and consulting.
Raymond Corp. has hired David Furman as its new vice president of marketing. He joins Raymond from Agfa Corp., where he had served as senior manager of business and channel development of the NAFTA region. In his new role, Furman will head up Raymond's market research, marketing communications, product marketing, technical publications, and training operations.
HK Systems has made two major changes to its management team. John Hines has been promoted to president, HK Production Logistics. In his new position, Hines, who had been executive vice president and chief financial officer for HK Systems, will oversee operations for the new division, which is designed to help clients manage inbound flow and provide critical logistics services. He will also continue to serve as a director of HK Systems.
In the other move, James (Jamie) Purko has been appoint ed to replace Hines as vice president and chief financial officer of HK Systems. He previously had been the company's vice president and controller.
AL Systems has added two new members to its corporate family. Kim Baudry is the new director of client development. She is a veteran of the warehouse and material handling industry. Before joining AL Systems, Baudry was regional vice president at Reddwerks, where she led sales efforts for the Southeast region. Joining Baudry on the client development team is Dave Takats. He will serve as client development manager. He previously led alliance development and sales efforts for ESYNC.
Mark Riedel is joining GRSI as vice president. GRSI is a material handling and packaging systems integrator based in Conshohocken, Pa. In his new role, Riedel will focus on sales and business project management, working from GRSI's western regional office in Phoenix.
FKI Logistex Canada has appointed Michael Bell as its customer service and support manager. Bell, who has been with FKI for 10 years, started out as a site technician for an automated storage and retrieval distribution plant in Glasgow, Scotland.
Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York, has been selected as the Person of the Year by the New York/New Jersey Foreign Freight Forwarders and Brokers Association. King is currently serving his eighth term in the House of Representatives and is a ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee. The Person of the Year Award honors individuals who have made a significant impact on the global trade community.
Fortna has hired Richard Kingdon as vice president of supply chain consulting. Based in Toronto, Kingdon will focus on developing Fortna's Canadian business. In the past, he founded his own supply chain consulting business, In Stride Solutions. Kingdon also led Arthur Andersen's Canadian supply chain practice.
The Port of Tacoma has made several management changes. Brian Mannelly has been named director of port planning, Michael Keim is the new senior contracts administrator, and David Myers and Tom Kress have both been named senior project managers.
Warehouse automation vendor Locus Robotics marked the grand opening of its global headquarters facility in Wilmington, Mass., this week.
The state-of-the-art, 157,000 square-foot Locus Park facility “serves as the nexus for hundreds of Locus employees driving the company's mission to revolutionize global supply chains through advanced robotics solutions,” the company said in a statement Thursday.
The new headquarters boasts an expansive research and development, testing, and engineering space, and is home base to the firm’s nearly 200 New England area employees. The facility also handles all robotics manufacturing, shipping, and administration functions.
“Locus Park represents our commitment to innovation and our confidence in the future,” company CEO Rick Faulk said in the statement. “It's a launchpad for the next generation of robotics and AI solutions that will redefine warehouse efficiency and empower workforces worldwide. As we stand at the forefront of industrial automation, we're not just leading the industry but transforming it.”
Alongside the grand opening, Locus also celebrated surpassing four billion units picked across its customer deployments around the world.
For links and show notes, mouse over the player and click the .
Transcript
About this week's guest
Dennis Moon is chief operating officer of Roadie. He has served in executive management positions in both public and privately held companies over the past 15 years, including as executive vice president for Medovex Corp., a medical device and technology company, and chief operations officer for JCS, where he assisted in the sale of the company to a private equity fund and remained COO of the JCS Division for Correctional Healthcare Companies. As COO, his responsibilities included supervising the day-to-day operations and maintenance of over 50,000 monthly clients, over 200 city, county and state contracts, 70 physical office locations, more than 400 employees and over 1.8 million financial transactions per year.
Prior to his career in executive management, Moon served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence analyst and combat engineer with TS/SCI Clearance. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 00:01
Delivering Halloween. Forecasting technology trends. And is pallet handling the next robotic frontier?
Pull up a chair and join us, as the editors of
DC Velocity discuss these stories, as well as news and supply chain trends, on this week's Logistics Matters podcast.
Hi, I'm Dave Maloney. I'm the group editorial director at
DC Velocity. Welcome.
Logistics Matters is sponsored by Zebra Robotics Automation. Are you tired of overpriced, underutilized autonomous mobile robot fulfillment solutions that drain your profits? It's time to switch to Zebra Robotics Automation. Their cutting-edge Zebra Symmetry fulfillment solution is engineered to reduce your cost per unit and give you that unbeatable competitive edge. Don't settle for less. Maximize your profits with Zebra. Discover the future of fulfillment at zebra.com/fulfillment.
As usual, our
DC Velocity senior editors Ben Ames and Victoria Kickham will be alone to provide their insights into the top stories of this week.
But to begin today, Halloween is just a few days away. The holiday has grown over the years to be the second or third most popular holiday, depending on which survey you trust. So, it's basically right up there with Christmas and Thanksgiving. Making sure that deliveries of all the decorations and treats get to their destinations on time is a big task, and to find out what's involved in all of that, here's Victoria with today's guest.
Victoria.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 01:35
Thanks, Dave. Our guest today is Dennis Moon, chiefoperating officer for crowdsourced delivery platform Roadie. Welcome Dennis.
Dennis Moon, Chief Operating Officer, Roadie 01:43
Thank you.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 01:45
Yeah, thanks for joining us today. I think most of our listeners are familiar with Roadie, but can you just give us a quick overview of the company and its role in the supply chain?
Dennis Moon, Chief Operating Officer, Roadie 01:54
Absolutely. We've been around since 2014. Roadie is a logistics-management and crowdsource delivery platform. We're also a UPS company, and our role in the supply chain is to offer businesses fast, flexible, and asset-light logistics solutions in the last mile.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 02:10
Terrific. So, as Dave said, supply chains are gearing up for this Halloween season. Retailers are busy getting orders out to people. How does demand for all those costumes, decorations, and candy affect supply chains?
Dennis Moon, Chief Operating Officer, Roadie 02:24
It really kicks off the peak season for us, and as we've been doing this for a while, it gets a little bit different every year, but what we're seeing is a lot of retailers are kicking off their peak season at the same time as Halloween. So, as we can see, and you probably have noticed, more and more sales events and promotions are kicking off earlier and earlier into the season, so I think it's really good, because we're able to take the momentum that we start for Halloween, continue it on to delivering for people right into peak, and it also really helps with that last-minute Halloween rush that a lot of people have. I would just say the other thing is that, you know, consumers, and us as consumers, we're just really getting used to following the promotions more than we are following the event, so we've been seeing that over the last couple of years.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 03:08
Great. Thank you. Along with all of that, so Roadie has a partnership with Spirit Halloween, which is a retailer that's certainly at the forefront of dealing with these particular peak-season challenges that are happening right now. Can you describe the partnership and how it works?
Dennis Moon, Chief Operating Officer, Roadie 03:23
Yeah, I'm really excited about this one. Spirit Halloween is North America's leading Halloween retailer, and we provide same-day delivery from spirit Halloween's online stores across the United States. So same-day's available in more than 800 Spirit Halloween retail locations, allowing their customers to receive their items quickly and conveniently, just like they would with any other delivery. But Halloween fans have access to hundreds, if not thousands of SKUs in that same-day marketplace, and we're just really excited, as I said earlier, to be able to start propelling ourselves as we enter into a really big peak season.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 03:59
And I think you said — how many stores are you doing this in?
Dennis Moon, Chief Operating Officer, Roadie 04:02
Eight hundred Spirit Halloween retail locations, and this is the first time they've offered it. So, it's new to them and it's new to us, so we're just really excited about the opportunity.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 04:09
Yeah, I'm very familiar with the store, and that sounds new to me, so... .Is Roadie working with otherretailers on similar solutions designed to help manage this Halloween demand?
Dennis Moon, Chief Operating Officer, Roadie 04:19
Yeah, you know, one of our most notable specialty retailers, and one of the bigger customers during Halloween, is the Home Depots of this world. And as everybody knows, they've got a really, really good selection of Halloween decorations that I see in my neighborhood every day, and being able to deliver some of those really big yard decorations has been super cool for us, and we've been doing a lot of it this Halloween season.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 04:46
So, what trends are you seeing in same-day delivery service in general? How are technology advances, for example, things like AI, affecting the industry?
Dennis Moon, Chief Operating Officer, Roadie 04:56
Yeah, you know, [I've] been doing this for a while, and just, every year, more and more retailers create or have same-day as just standard expectation for online shopping. It's pretty surprising. Going back 10 years, no one did, not many people did, and they just really didn't have it on its radar. So, the adoption rate is accelerating. Everyone feels that they must have same-day delivery to compete, and retailers have really found that just the same-day model gives them that competitive edge. It increases revenue, and it's good for them, it's good for their customers. We did a survey recently where we conducted, it found 80% of companies reported an increased revenue with same-day delivery, so it really is starting to prove itself. To answer your question about AI's impact. It's helping optimize delivery routes for us. It balances delivery capacity. We're using it all over the place, from customer support all the way to helping drivers make decisions on what's the most economical route for them, what's the best route, what's the best offer that they should make — so, just giving them all the information. And making sure that we're as transparent as possible, utilizing all the AI technology that we can behind the scenes so that drivers can make a good decision. It enables our retailers to anticipate demand. So, as we think about, we've got a bit of demand going into the Halloween season, but it's going to get really, really hectic with a compressed peak as people who follow UPS know, it came out yesterday, you know, Carol Tomé talked about it: 17 business days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. So we haven't seen that compressed of a peak since 2019, which means all of the supply chain is just going to have to really, really work well together to get things to people right before the holiday. And AI is going to be a big part of it as we implement it more and more in different facets of our business.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 06:47
Looking ahead to the holiday peak — we've touched on that throughout this conversation — how large a role will this crowdsource delivery model play in helping businesses manage all those last-minute holiday deliveries? Just sort of a general perspective on that?
Dennis Moon, Chief Operating Officer, Roadie 07:02
Yeah, it's a great question, and every year, we become a bigger and bigger part of it. Consumers are looking for same-day, fast deliveries,crowdsource platforms like Roadie, we play a really big part, and part of that is probably because we're seeing more and more retailers, the big retailers, need to move product closer to customers. So, there's a sense of forward distribution coming out of the brick-and-mortar stores, where, in years past, everything would come out of a distribution center somewhere else. So they've got to have the product in the store, and we've got to get it to their customers fast, which is just really, really growing every single year, especially in some of the biggest retailers that everybody knows that have the best deals when it comes to Black Friday, Cyber Monday. A vast majority of that volume is coming from the stores now, where it used to come out of their distribution centers.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 07:51
Dennis, anything else on this topic you want to mention as we gear up for Halloween next week, and looking further ahead to holiday peak?
Dennis Moon, Chief Operating Officer, Roadie 08:00
I would reiterate that it's going to be a short, compact, and hectic peak. As I said before, it was 27 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, 17 business days, which we haven't seen in quite some time, and this year, more more than ever, fast delivery is going to be critical. It's going to making sure people have it in hand, they have it wrapped, they have it ready, because we don't want to leave people wondering, will my package arrive on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning? But the other thing, as I mentioned earlier, is to combat this, we're seeing a lot of retailers pull forward. We're seeing a lot of events take place prior to Black Friday, whereas it used to be Black Friday Cyber Monday, were the big Super Bowls of our year. Some things are kicking off early in November. Some things are going to have really, really good sales and events that go on all the way through the month of November and into early December, so I think the retailers are smart. They're trying to identify, they can't get everything done in that very, very condensed window, so let's go ahead and spread it out over a longer period of time. And the consumers are smart too, because they're just looking for, you know, really good deals on what they need to purchase for this peak season. So, the last thing I'll just say is that a lot of it will take place online. More and more and more of Black Friday, Cyber Monday is becoming an online event, and according to International Trade Administration, e-commerce in the U.S. is growing an annual rate of 11.22%, and the global marketplace is expected to reach 5.5 trillion by 2027, so it's just showing us the data to support that we're in the right space, and people are utilizing e-comm more and more every single year.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 09:35
That's certainly true. We see that, in, I think, in our work and in our lives here, so... . Thank you, Dennis, very much for joining us today. We appreciate your insight.
Dennis Moon, Chief Operating Officer, Roadie 09:45
Thank you guys for having me. Have a great day.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 09:47
Thank you. We've been talking with Dennis Moon of Roadie. Back to you, Dave.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 09:51
Thank you, Dennis and Victoria. Now let's take a look at some of the other supply chain news from the week, and Ben, you wrote this week about a forecast for technology trends. What can you tell us?
Ben Ames, Senior News Editor, DC Velocity 10:05
That's right. You know, as we near the end of the year, many experts throughout the logistics sector take this chance to make some forecasts and predictions for 2025 that may seem like a long way away, but we're halfway through the fourth quarter already, so now's the time to plan, and one of the first ones that I saw came this week from Forrester, the technology analyst group. Forrester pointed out that 2024, to no surprise, has been a particularly challenging year for companies, especially in asset-intensive industries like manufacturing and transportation. That's because those asset-intensive industries and businesses quickly feel the pain when energy prices rise, when raw materials become harder to access, or when borrowing money for capital projects becomes more expensive. And all of those conditions arose in 2024, so that forced some of those leaders — again in manufacturing and transportation — to focus even more than usual, on managing the costs and improving efficiency, to find that balance point. All this was According to researcher Paul Miller, who's vice president and principal analyst at Forrester.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 11:16
Well Ben, there certainly were a lot of supply chain disruptions this past year. Did the report say whether they felt 2025 would be any easier on supply chains?
Ben Ames, Senior News Editor, DC Velocity 11:27
Well, it did say, and unfortunately they are forecasting that it will not be all that much smoother. Forrester's latest forecast doesn't anticipate any dramatic improvement in the global macroeconomic situation for 2025, but it does anticipate several ways that companies will probably adapt. So, for 2025, Forrester predicts that over 25% of the big last-mile service and delivery fleets over in Europe will have become electric across the continent. So, between the different nations, they are analyzing parcel delivery firms, utility companies, even local governments that operate large fleets of small vans over relatively short distances, and so, for all those sorts of applications, electrification is an opportunity both to manage costs and to lower carbon emissions. In a second analysis of what we were likely to see, they said that probably less than 5% of the robots that we see in factories and warehouses will be walking. We might have seen a lot of recent headlines — I've written some of them myself — about some rise in two-legged robots that are now able to be designed. Forrester says that the compelling use cases for two-legged robots are less obvious than supporters suggest. Specifically, they said that those kind of robots, they might have a wow factor, but they probably don't have the best form factor for addressing the industry's dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks, which, that's a frequent way of describing the type of assignments that go to robots. And finally, that the third look forward at 2025, Forrester said that car makers, automakers are going to make significant cuts to their digital divisions, sort of admitting defeat after having invested billions of dollars industrywide to try to build the capability to design all those connected platforms and digital features that we see in modern vehicles. Instead, the future of mobility will be underpinned by sort of ecosystems of various technology providers. So, it won't — a vehicle won't necessarily be reliant on the same large automaker that made the car itself to also make the digital platforms on the inside of it.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 13:53
But those really do look like some interesting trends. I guess we'll see how it all plays out in the coming year.
Ben Ames, Senior News Editor, DC Velocity 13:59
Yeah, absolutely I hadn't thought of the car one. I think we all touch base with that, probably daily, and it's interesting to try to figure out who's making the stuff.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 14:09
Certainly is. Thank you. Ben.
Ben Ames, Senior News Editor, DC Velocity 14:11
Glad to.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 14:12
And Victoria, as robots continue to make inroads into our distribution centers, there's one area that's just now getting a little bit of love from those robots. Can you give us the details?
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 14:23
Absolutely, yes. So, I recently wrote about the continuing trend toward implementing warehouse robotics and discovered that there's a bit of a shift happening in where many warehouses are applying the latest technologies. A lot of companies have been focused on applying robotics to picking tasks as a way to handle accelerating e-commerce orders.We saw this trend really gain steam leading up to 2020, and then, of course, during the pandemic years. Many of those early automation gains are bearing fruit, so some companies are shifting their automation focus behind those picking lines, so to speak, and applying robotics to bulk handling, particularly pallets. I spoke to a handful of robotics vendors recently about the reasons behind this trendand what they are seeing in terms of how warehouses are using pallet-handling robots.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 15:09
Victoria, what's driving that shift to moving towards more bulk handling?
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 15:14
Well, one reason is that this is a labor-intensive process. Bulk items like pallets are moved by people with human-operated equipment, for the most part, and there are a lot of different movements of pallets throughout the warehouse. Workers are often moving them up and down, side to side, from receiving to storage, from storage to shipping, and so forth. So it's an area that's ripe for automation in many ways. But it's difficult to automate all of those pallet moves within a warehouse, so the trick is finding the processes within your facility that make the most sense to automate. Some facilities may benefit from using AGVs or AMRs to transport pallets between destinations; others could apply forklift AGVs to move pallets in and out of storage; and there are also robotic pallet shuttles, which can move pallets into and out of dense storage racking as part of a larger system. Now, all of these productshave been around for a while, but there's much research and development going on, making them better, smarter, more effective, and also in developing pallet-handling robotics that work in concert as a system. Really, what I learned is that this is very much about relieving pressure on labor and keeping goods flowing through the warehouse.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 16:24
Yeah, because of those labor needs — and I think that's going to be still a growing problem — we will see more robots plying their trade and handling those heavy loads. It just makes a lot of sense.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 16:33
It certainly does.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 16:35
Thank you, Victoria,
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 16:36
You're welcome.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 16:38
We encourage listeners to go to dcvelocity.com for more on these and other supply chain stories. Also check out the podcast Notes section for some direct links to read more about the topics that we discussed today.
And we'd like to thank our guest, Dennis Moon of Roadie, for being with us today. We welcome your comments on this topic and our other stories. You can email us at
podcast@agilebme.com.
We also encourage you to subscribe to
Logistics Matters at your favorite podcast platform. Our new episodes are uploaded on Fridays.
Speaking of subscribing, check out our sister podcast series,
Supply Chain in the Fast Lane. We have a 10-episode series currently playing on the state of logistics. Check out Supply Chain in the Fast Lane wherever you get your podcasts.
And a reminder that
Logistics Matters is sponsored by Zebra Robotics Automation. Are you tired of overpriced, underutilized autonomous mobile robot fulfillment solutions that drain your profits? It's time to switch to Zebra Robotics Automation. Their cutting-edge Zebra Symmetry fulfillment solution is engineered to reduce your cost per unit and give you that unbeatable competitive edge. Don't settle for less. Maximize your profits with Zebra. Discover the future of fulfillment at zebra.com/fulfillment.
We'll be back again next week with another edition of
Logistics Matters. Be sure to join us. Until then, have a great week.
Business leaders in the manufacturing and transportation sectors will increasingly turn to technology in 2025 to adapt to developments in a tricky economic environment, according to a report from Forrester.
That approach is needed because companies in asset-intensive industries like manufacturing and transportation quickly feel the pain when energy prices rise, raw materials are harder to access, or borrowing money for capital projects becomes more expensive, according to researcher Paul Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester.
And all of those conditions arose in 2024, forcing leaders to focus even more than usual on managing costs and improving efficiency. Forrester’s latest forecast doesn’t anticipate any dramatic improvement in the global macroeconomic situation in 2025, but it does anticipate several ways that companies will adapt.
For 2025, Forrester predicts that:
over 25% of big last-mile service and delivery fleets in Europe will be electric. Across the continent, parcel delivery firms, utility companies, and local governments operating large fleets of small vans over relatively short distances see electrification as an opportunity to manage costs while lowering carbon emissions.
less than 5% of the robots entering factories and warehouses will walk. While industry coverage often focuses on two-legged robots, Forrester says the compelling use cases for those legs are less common — or obvious — than supporters suggest. The report says that those robots have a wow factor, but they may not have the best form factor for addressing industry’s dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks.
carmakers will make significant cuts to their digital divisions, admitting defeat after the industry invested billions of dollars in recent years to build the capability to design the connected and digital features installed in modern vehicles. Instead, the future of mobility will be underpinned by ecosystems of various technology providers, not necessarily reliant on the same large automaker that made the car itself.
This story first appeared in the September/October issue of Supply Chain Xchange, a journal of thought leadership for the supply chain management profession and a sister publication to AGiLE Business Media & Events’' DC Velocity.
For the trucking industry, operational costs have become the most urgent issue of 2024, even more so than issues around driver shortages and driver retention. That’s because while demand has dropped and rates have plummeted, costs have risen significantly since 2022.
As reported by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), every cost element has increased over the past two years, including diesel prices, insurance premiums, driver rates, and trailer and truck payments. Operating costs increased beyond $2.00 per mile for the first time ever in 2022. This trend continued in 2023, with the total marginal cost of operating a truck rising to $2.27 per mile, marking a new record-high cost. At the same time, the average spot rate for a dry van was $2.02 per mile, meaning that trucking companies would lose $0.25 per mile to haul a dry van load at spot rates.
These high costs have placed a significant burden on the operations of trucking companies, challenging their financial sustainability over the last two years. As a result, 2023 saw approximately 8,000 brokers and 88,000 trucking companies cease operations, including some marquee names, such as Yellow Corp. and Convoy, and decades-long businesses, such as Matheson Trucking and Arnold Transportation Services.
More so than ever before, trucking companies need to get better at efficiently using their assets and reducing operational costs. So, what is a trucking company to do? Technology is the answer! Given the nature of the problem, technology-led innovation will be critical to ensure companies can balance rising costs through efficient operations.
One technology that could be the answer to many of the trucking industry’s issues is the concept of digital twins. A digital twin is a virtual model of a real system and simulates the physical state and behavior of the real system. As the physical system changes state, the digital twin keeps up with the real-world changes and provides predictive and decision-making capabilities built on top of the digital model.
DHL, in a 2023 white paper, suggests that—due to the maturation of technologies such as the internet of things (IoT), cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced software engineering paradigms, and virtual reality—digital twins have “come of age” and are now viable across multiple sectors, including transportation. We agree with this assessment and believe that digital twins are essential to radically improving the processes of fleet planning and dispatch.
THE NEED TO AUTOMATE
Outside of attaining procurement efficiencies, trucking companies can achieve lower costs by focusing on critical operational levers such as minimizing deadheads, reducing driver dwell time, and maximizing driver and asset utilization.
However, manual methods of planning and dispatch cannot optimally balance these levers to achieve efficiency and cost control. Even when planners work very hard and owners strive to improve processes, optimizing fleet planning is not a problem humans can solve routinely. Planning is a computationally intensive activity. To achieve fleet-level efficiencies, the planner has to consider all possible truck-to-load combinations in real time and solve for many operational constraints such as drivers’ hours of service, customer windows, and driver home time, to name just a few. These computations become even more complex when you add in the dynamic nature of real-world conditions such as trucks getting stuck in traffic or breaking down or orders getting delayed. This is not a task humans do best! For these sorts of tasks, technology has the upper hand.
When a company creates a digital twin of its trucking network, it has a real-time model that factors in truck locations, drivers’ hours of service, and loads being executed and planned. Planners can then use this digital model to assess possible decisions and select ones that increase asset utilization, improve customer and driver satisfaction, and lower costs.
For example, a digital twin of the network can offer significant insights and analysis on the state of the network, including exceptions such as delayed pickups and deliveries, unassigned loads, and trucks needing assignments. Backed by AI that takes business rules into account, digital twins can allow companies to optimize their fleet performance by finding the most efficient load assignments and dynamically adjusting in real time to changes in traffic patterns and weather, customer delays, truck issues, and so on.
With a digital twin, carriers can optimize the matching of assets, drivers, and freight. Typically, an investment in this innovative technology results in a 20%+ increase in productive miles per truck, while also improving driver pay and significantly decreasing driver churn. Drivers get paid by the miles they run, so when they run more, they are able to make more money, resulting in less need to chase the next job in search of better pay.
ADDITIONAL BENEFITS
Digital twins also combat deadheading, another source of driver dissatisfaction and cost inefficiencies. On average, over-the-road drivers spend 17%–20% of road miles driving empty. Using a digital twin, a company can search across several freight sources to find a load that perfectly matches the deadhead leg without impacting downstream commitments. These additional revenue miles will help drivers to maximize their earnings on the road and carriers to maximize their asset utilization and profitability.
The traditional manual dispatch planning model is becoming increasingly outdated—each planner and fleet manager tasked with overseeing 30 to 40 vehicles. Carriers try to manage this problem by dividing the fleet into manageable chunks, which results in cross-fleet inefficiencies. Such a system isn’t scalable. A digital twin acts as an equalizer for small and mid-sized fleets. It enables carriers to expand by venturing beyond the fixed routes and network they were forced to run out of fear of additional logistical complexity.
A digital twin can also give an organization the transparency and visibility it needs to find and fix inefficiencies. A successful carrier will leverage the technology to learn from the hitches in its operations. While this visibility is beneficial in its own right, it also provides the first step toward a seamless, digitized operation. “Digital revolution” is a buzzword frequently heard at transportation conferences. Yet not too many organizations are dedicated to digitizing their operations past the visibility stage. The end goal should be using decision-support systems to automate key elements of the system, thus freeing up planners from their daily rote tasks to focus on problems that only humans can solve.
Finally incorporating a digital twin can also help trucking companies work toward the broader trend of creating greener supply chains. Because they have lower deadhead and dwell times, trucking companies that have adopted a digital twin can be more attractive to shippers that are looking for more efficient operations that meet their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals.
THE FUTURE IS HERE
It is important to note that the benefits described here are not dreams for the future; digital twin technology is already here. In fact, choosing a digital twin can seem daunting because there are already a spectrum of options out there. First and foremost, an organization must ensure that the digital twin it selects aligns with both the goals and the scope of its operation.
Additionally, the ideal digital twin should:
Operate in near real time. A digital twin should be able to refresh as often as the network changes.
Be able to factor in specific customer delivery requirements as well as asset- and operator-specific constraints.
Be computationally efficient and comprehensive as it considers thousands of permutations in milliseconds. The digital twin should be able to reoptimize an entire fleet’s schedule of multi-day routes on the fly.
Before implementing a digital twin, carriers need to make sure that they have robust data management processes in place. Electronic logging devices (ELDs), customers’ tenders, billing, shipments, and so on are already inundating carriers with a glut of data. However, the manual nature of operations in many carriers leads to poor data quality. Carriers will need to invest in data management approaches to improve data quality to support the generation and use of high-fidelity digital twins. Otherwise, the digital twin will not be representative of reality and companies will run into an issue of “garbage in, garbage out.”
REINVENTION AND TRANSFORMATION
While data management is critical, change management through the ranks of dispatch operations is often a harder task. In fact, the largest roadblock carriers face when undergoing a digital transformation is the lack of willingness to change, not the technology itself. Many carriers cling to outmoded planning methods. Planners, used to operating based on well-worn business rules and tribal knowledge, could be wary of the technology and resistant to change. They may need to be assured that, while it is true that every trucking network is uniquely complex, digital twins can be set up to model the intricacies of their specific dispatch operations and drive value to the network. A significant amount of time and resources will need to be expended on change management. Otherwise even though trucking companies may invest in cutting-edge technology, they won't be able to fully capitalize on the added value it can provide.
As the truckload industry works through the current freight cycle, it is important to realize that change is inevitable. Carriers will need to reinvent their operations and invest in technologies to ride through the busts and booms of future freight cycles. Recent global events point to the many ways that wrenches can be thrown into global transportation networks, and the fact that such volatility is here to stay. Digital twins can provide companies with the visibility to navigate such changes. But above all, an operation that uses the digital twin to drive decisions can make customers and drivers happy, and help the carriers keep their heads above water during times such as now.
Regular online readers of DC Velocity and Supply Chain Xchange have probably noticed something new during the past few weeks. Our team has been working for months to produce shiny new websites that allow you to find the supply chain news and stories you need more easily.
It is always good for a media brand to undergo a refresh every once in a while. We certainly are not alone in retooling our websites; most of you likely go through that rather complex process every few years. But this was more than just your average refresh. We did it to take advantage of the most recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI).
Most of the AI work will take place behind the scenes. We will not, for instance, use AI to generate our stories. Those will still be written by our award-winning editorial team (I realize I’m biased, but I believe them to be the best in the business). Instead, we will be applying AI to things like graphics, search functions, and prioritizing relevant stories to make it easier for you to find the information you need along with related content.
We have also redesigned the websites’ layouts to make it quick and easy to find articles on specific topics. For example, content on DC Velocity’s new site is divided into five categories: material handling, robotics, transportation, technology, and supply chain services. We also offer a robust video section, including case histories, webcasts, and executive interviews, plus our weekly podcasts.
Over on the Supply Chain Xchange site, we have organized articles into categories that align with the traditional five phases of supply chain management: plan, procure, produce, move, and store. Plus, we added a “tech” category just to round it off. You can also find links to our videos, newsletters, podcasts, webcasts, blogs, and much more on the site.
Our mobile-app users will also notice some enhancements. An increasing number of you are receiving your daily supply chain news on your phones and tablets, so we have revamped our sites for optimal performance on those devices. For instance, you’ll find that related stories will appear right after the article you’re reading in case you want to delve further into the topic.
However you view us, you will find snappier headlines, more graphics and illustrations, and sites that are easier to navigate.
I would personally like to thank our management, IT department, and editors for their work in making this transition a reality. In our more than 20 years as a media company, this is our largest expansion into digital yet.