Attend any trade show or exhibition for 3PLs and your company is likely to be bombarded by vendors and academics touting the latest and greatest in blockchain, software, and big data.
This feeling of being overwhelmed is usually followed closely by a fear that your firm is already miles behind the competition and that your best bet in getting back into the 3PL space is by buying up all the digitized tracking software your company credit card can handle.
And who could blame you or your supply chain manager with trade show programs featuring talks such as ‘Artificial Intelligence in Transport Logistics’ and ‘Truck Drivers 4.0 – Quo Vadis Professional HGV Drivers?’.
This is precisely what Hanhaa Ltd. found to be the case for far too many 3PLs at the 2019 ‘transport logistic Exhibition’ in Munich, Germany, which took place the first week of June.
Instead of succumbing to this pack mentality in adopting any and every nascent technology, though, Hanhaa was heartened to discover the life-time value of their customers continued to increase around three, core operational principles, or: the new CSR of convenience, sustainability, and reusability.
Here’s what the voice of the consumer revealed over the four-day event.
C is for convenience:
Last-mile delivery personnel, high-value product manufacturers, and cross-border operators all agreed that the convenience afforded them by ParceLive allowed front-line managers to shift their time and energy away from less-value added activities to more strategic tasks with greater outcomes for the customer in mind.
ParceLive achieves this for the 3PL by offering not only one-stop shopping for tracking, monitoring, and updating package locations on one single platform, but also allowing the firm to, in turn, provide this same insight to their brokerage firm, courier, or customer.
This service within a service feature was not only a turn-key convenience for the harried cross-dock personnel, but added an additional layer of consistency in that one platform ensured one, clear message as to when and how a parcel would arrive.
Industry experts also believe this ability and willingness to cross-share information will result in less “scattered and siloed” information that will ultimately culminate a more accurate “version of the truth”.
Lastly, attendees noted that the simple return process for the tracker was another activity they could effectively outsource and, in so doing, get back to the more operational aspects of running lean their companies. ParceLive merely requires the 3PL or his/her customer to detach the tracker from the package or parcel and post it without stamps or envelopes from anywhere in the world.
Convenient and cost-effective without digitalization means cost savings that get passed along to your firm’s bottom-line as well as to the long-time recipient of your goods and services.
S is for sustainability:
In keeping with the above discourse, it should come as little wonder, then, that ParceLive devotees are also aware that by adopting products that are sustainable they are able to make their own products and processes sustainable.
This idea is more than just a business buzzword, of course, as it is increasingly typifying the operational environment in which last-mile delivery personnel must operate.
Poorly monitored shipments, inaccurate maps, and dated information only slow and make more congested already jammed city streets. Couple this with municipal and government policymakers facing environmental regulatory hurdles and calls-to-action from local residents, and the last mile starts to feel like the last inch!
With ParceLive, however, these increasingly-constrained operators have the power and flexibility to either passively or actively monitor products and processes for up to 50 days when data is recorded every hour.
Thus, gaining insight into where one’s systems are breaking down and resulting in logjams, both physically and virtually, allows the supply chain manager to make both real-time corrections on account of weather, tolls, or accidents as well as make more strategic routes in order to avoid cross-border delays and speed those time-sensitive deliveries without risk of shrink or product loss.
Consider that this latest exhibition featured over 64,000 visitors representing 125 countries with 25 international joint partnerships linking Southeast Asia to the European Union via the Middle East and you begin to get a sense of the potential knock-on effects one delay in one country can have for, say, a food provider.
ParceLive, therefore, allows shippers to find the most up-to-date routes toward achieving fast, reliable, and dependable deliveries with the least amount of product and process waste on the market.
R is for re-usability:
Being able to drop a transponder and tracker into the post with no packaging means that Hanhaa is able to recycle, reconfigure, and reuse their devices over and over again.
Not only does this mean less electronic and traditional waste polluting the planet, but also an excellent value proposition that the 3PL can leverage and use when marketing their own services for downstream or upstream use with suppliers and consumers, respectively.
ParceLive is more than just reusable products, however, in that their platforms are also relevant, timely, and updated on a regular basis with the option for ongoing training to those looking to upgrade their service pairings.
By offering this recharging and updating feature on all its trackers and software, means that ParceLive not only reduces wasteful and unnecessary steps in the fulfillment process, but also all wasteful and unnecessary steps when purchasing new and even off-the-shelf products year after year.
While it should not take a conference or large international exhibition to get your supply chain manager feeling anxious about the current state of logistics around the world, sometimes a sense of urgency is necessary in making the leap from industry 3.0 to industry 4.0.
That said, allow Hanhaa Ltd.’s ParceLive ecosystem to act as your safety net during the adoption and implementation phase.
Not only will the initiative up front cost be paid back in no time, but the lasting and complementary services will improve your 3PL’s triple-bottom line while simultaneously recommitting the overall organization to a CSR-driven strategy…
No matter what each letter means to you and your firm.
