As published on CIO.IN on 24th July'2017

Global organizations are struggling to keep up with the demands of an increasingly insatiable market while remaining profitable.

The world of logistics is more volatile, uncertain and competitive than ever before. With the consumers’ demanding changes and with Uberization seeping in, the logistics industry is undergoing a major transformation with all signs indicating that this will only intensify hereon. Global organizations are struggling to keep up with the demands of an increasingly insatiable market while remaining profitable. In such a landscape, suboptimal decisions made every day can have an immense impact on the bottom line and if left unaddressed, can be irreparable.

The best defense in the face of sudden change is agility, but agility takes on different meanings at different levels. When it comes to operations, the decisions you make must be fast, accurate, satisfy all business KPIs and take rules and constraints into account simultaneously. Despite best efforts to keep up with the rapid pace of digitization and best planning methods, companies are finding it difficult to cope with the required pace.

Despite best efforts to keep up with the rapid pace of digitization and best planning methods, companies are finding it difficult to cope with the required pace.

With artificial intelligence (AI) gaining pace, businesses are rethinking and redesigning their operations to make their logistics ‘smarter’, to make new age solutions like anticipatory and elastic logistics possible.

AI is transforming the way business operations are performed, making the ecosystem connected and making it a ‘smarter world.’ AI has the power to create new revenue streams by identifying, analyzing and most importantly, acting on insights derived from the humongous data generated around us. It shows us a world that is less task-oriented and more relationship-oriented. In a world racing towards automation and technology, the maturity of AI and the discernment of a cognitive world allow us to retain our compassion, curiosity and conscience. But, the most of the logistics processes still remain complex with no visibility. This, is the promise and the potential of a cognitive era, causing a huge shift in how organizations engage and transform, bringing an enterprise into a single unit and making them ‘go digital.’ Some of the benefits for enterprises arising from blending IT systems and operations include driving efficiency, simplification of processes and digitization of operations.

In the digital era, as AI becomes pervasive in logistics operations across multiple industries—such as pathology, financial services, retail, supply chain and express—the attention moves to personalized experiences, they take relevant, well informed and faster decisions. Parcel shop deliveries, locker deliveries, same day deliveries - the demands are endless. There is a need for a neutral layer which makes everything possible with minimum time, effort and cost.

With digitalization of logistics, where the jobs are mundane and complex, AI and machine learning are playing a pivotal role. When AI is infused with ‘cognitive’ systems—next-generation systems that work side by side with humans, accelerating our ability to create, learn, make decisions and think—it then transcends barriers of scale, speed, scope and standards. And provides a broad set of capabilities that can conceivably lead to optimal decisions. Cognitive solutions can help in deciphering structured and unstructured data thus, providing enterprises with ‘smart’ insights for making swift decisions. 

Today, the confluence of four fundamental shifts - IoT, AI, changing business demands and real-time API’s is making a huge paradigm shift that helps organizations become smarter and better. The business-critical nature of cloud is made possible by reliable and secure networks, compute and storage. Secondly, the Internet of Things is empowering businesses to transform how they serve their customers, and the way people interact with the world around them. Thirdly, artificial intelligence – like IoT, will change interactions between consumers and producers of services across all industries. And finally, APIs - in terms of acceleration provides the most compelling services to data-hungry users’ fingertips.

In a world racing towards automation and technology, the maturity of AI and the discernment of a cognitive world allow us to retain our compassion, curiosity and conscience.

The all-encompassing bouquet of new-age technologies will enable enterprises to get connected globally and optimize the existing networks and application performance. The services suite helps in monitoring network and app workloads in real time, assessing network performance, prioritizing network, simplifying and accelerating the existing processes. Adapting comprehensive and proactive approach not only optimizes performance but also saves time, costs and resources.

Keeping in view the thoughtfulness of Artificial Intelligence and the perks of the adapting cloud, today’s CIO must think of redesigning the existing processes and systems in order to increase the bottom-line profits.

For more information write to contact@fareye.in