Much has been made of Industry 4.0. Already new and disruptive technology has brought significant change to the freight and logistics landscape. Liesl Venter takes a look at the top tech trends.
The Cloud, Robotics, Transparency and Data Automation Agile Security Low Code Cloud has enormous momentum that is not likely to be slowed down by anything any time soon, says Mark Gatenby, CIO at Tigers. “This is easily the biggest current global tech trend of the past five years and the biggest change in IT as a whole in the past 25 years.”There are multiple real value adds for cloud services with scalability, cost, flexibility, security and speed to market the key reasons for their success.“
The ability to try things out quickly and cheaply and then scale those services up is allowing all companies to be much more creative and innovative, something that was previously preserved for specialised tech companies only,” explains Gatenby.
“The cloud is now so much more than just hardware on tap; good cloud systems also have a large number of usable solutions baked into them to enable an enterprise to build advanced components and sub-systems into their existing applications. Integration, robotics, security features and graphical interfaces are all available for rapid trial and use.” A lot of new tech is becoming available that allows people with a non-technical background to produce services and applications based on point-and-click building blocks and f low diagrams.
This now allows people with business knowledge to build small, time-saving operational tools, integrations or data visualisations, according to Gatenby.This, says Renko Bergh, COO of Forte Data Solutions, allows the industry to speed up the rate of digitalisation.“The logistics industry has been late in joining the digital transformation caused by technological advancement. But it is finally adopting it gradually. However, this has and still will disrupt the industry in a number of ways,” he says.
“That is why logistics companies are starting to look into the risks and opportunities of this transformation and find the right balance between a disruption for positive change and the disruptions that are capable of placing the industry on a downward slope.”Logistics companies have always had a lot of paper service, dealing with plenty of data, says Forte Data Solutions COO Renko Bergh.
“So recent advances in the collection and analysis of data will only work more to benefit the logistics data. It might help them to optimise their network routes.”
A lot of effort has been put into robotic manipulation of new services, with older systems and data sources that previously were too difficult or expensive to work with, says Tigers' Mark Gatenby. But, says James Britz, Group IT Manager at CFR Freight, while it is important that industry executives are on the cutting edge of technology and not the bleeding edge, it is essential that these advancements are timeously leveraged within one’s business.According to to Tigers' Mark Gatenby, agile software development is allowing systems to be upgraded and improved in much more rapid timescales than were available in the past. Now it is days and weeks between releases, not months and quarters. “This is aided by improvements in automated testing features found in most development and operation cycles. We are also starting to see some agile techniques, like stand meetings or “scrums”, slip into non-IT usage as well.”
Digital platforms, says Forte's Bergh, have been one of the biggest disruptions to the transport and logistics sector, enabling capital expenses to be shared around f leets and warehouses and other such areas. With that has come the need for improved security and it is trending high as a priority in many companies.“Too many loose relationships and business partners, combined with a low margin industry, means that freight companies are favourite targets for hackers,” says Tigers' Mark Gatenby. “Old-style defences such as anti-virus software are no longer good enough on their own as hackers are much more sophisticated and often use social techniques to phish for usable data. Security now has to be a lot more holistic and cover breach detection and not just breach prevention.”
