Over the past three years, the logistics industry has seen a growing trend towards integration and automation, according to J-L Koekemoer, general manager of Ship-Shape Software.He told Freight News that the company had been developing its offering and had seen its successful implementation along with so-called robotic process automation.“There has been a marked increase in demand over the past 18 months, especially in areas well suited to the automation of repetitive data processing such as creditors’ invoices in our finance module and commercial invoices in the customs brokerage module.”According to Koekemoer process automation, especially where third-party vendors of the client’s choice are used, are only as robust and successful as the core system’s underlying integration layer. “To this end we have refined our comprehensive integration framework over the past two to three years to deliver and improve on this vital requirement.”Koekemoer said now more than ever software companies needed to have the right people in place to deliver the right solutions. “In our case, the appointment of Leon Jansen two years ago has been significant. His body of work elevated our integration capabilities to a new level of efficiency and sophistication.”Commenting on the impact of the novel coronavirus on industry, Koekemoer said it had forced business the world over to ref lect, reconsider and readjust many aspects of their operations. “An increasing number of businesses have moved their systems into hosted, cloud-based environments to truly benefit from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to avoid the significant costs and inherent risks associated with maintaining and ensuring availability in on-premise platforms,” he said. “We have also found that more customers are now, through necessity, utilising more of our productivity-enhancing features in the system. These include features that have been available for more than a decade.”
