Talking Point

Software Adoption

By Mr. Badre Maktari, Director – Business Technology, RSA Global

Commoditization of technology in the value chain is driving immense demand for software adoption. As software development firm has seen a certain degree of maturity in the discipline, devices, operating system, framework and coding languages. This in turns has enable rapid development of ideas from inceptions to reality in matter of weeks.

So if we take for example the last mile domain, in the past lager transportation firms dominated the technology due to the high investment involved. However today, almost anyone can start off a small last mile delivery business with 5,000 USD or less and deploy a technology solution to manage effectively their fleet and scale up using an Opex model.

This rapid simplification of technology adoption along with easy of deployment is create a frenzy of competition with small to medium organizations competing and winning business from larger organizations that are technology lethargic & outdated. This is further catalyzed by highly demanding consumers who are digitizing their life by ordering on e-commerce platforms. The knock on effect is a high throughput of transactions and expectations of same day or next day delivery being demanded. Traditional methods of fulfillment fail with high transactional demands and a low technology solution. As scale up becomes a costly affair in terms of recruitment and business readiness.

So, when you combine these factors i.e. large businesses losing market share, operations being less effective with higher workloads. There is a strong magnetic pull towards digitization. The most common hunt right now is the last mile delivery solutions that cover proof of delivery, trip planning and fleet management. With companies unable to handle the large volume of business generated by these e-commerce platform the need for a last mile aggregator is apparent. A business wants to win an e-commerce customer and distribute in a crowd sourced fashion with reliable partners that give it virtualized ability to scale and contract on demand.

We’re seeing blockchain being quite useful to guarantee payments in a market that is traditionally known to a problem, result in improve cash flow among partners. However, the maturity and wide adoption is still in its infancy at the moment. It this regards, larger firm are becoming aggregators in their space onboard their third party touchpoints to their platform to perform transaction. This race it probable the most interesting to keep your eyes on as competition and innovation is fierce.

Smaller trends like augmented reality could quickly become the logistics Google Street View of the warehouse or yards. Ensuring unfamiliar drivers not only get to the right place, however once they are there. Effortless meeting the right person, navigate to the exact position of the cargo and pick up the right item.

The move away from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and the adoption of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) has lead to more firms exchanging data and perform integration quickly. There also many company becoming aggregators of API, further solving the challenges of integrating with multiple partners that may have long lead time to certify a partner with their APIs. Open Data (ODATA) Protocol further simplify the exchange of data and reduces the quantity of APIs that developer need to create. True giving rise to data rich environment where predictive analytics will have enough data sources and volume to forecast nearly perfect demand.

It is rewarding to see handle devices manu-

facturers are taking consumer trends and designing devices more innovate and purposebuilt hardware. With devices becoming last many years for better ROI, quicker responses and more rugged. Withstanding the unforgiving hands of the industry. With more reliable devices, simpler user interfaces and general commonality of smart devices in consumer hands. There is a greater compliance on accuracy of data as almost everyone is tech savoy enough. Which is key driver to problem-solving issues before they grow into supply chain failures. With almost everyone having these devices there more tractability, delivery more accountability and reducing occurrences the occurrences of theft.

Overall, I believe it’s an exciting time in the supply chain domain where team with a passion for technology and the will to carry out a complete implementation. Deliver stable and outstanding solutions to their customer and quickly overtake their competition swiftly.