SIToſtware is IT when saving time, money, resources, streamlining


18 By John Jeter


Time was, when you wanted to book your vacation, you had to find a trusted travel agent


and spend hours


together hunched over an itinerary and sifting through elusive airline and hotel deals. All the while you’re thinking, “Gee, I should be sipping umbrella drinks on the beach by now.” “Now you can go to Google


and enter where you’re going and have all the options and prices


listed right says Ken Wood, there,” executive


vice president of Product Management at Decartes Systems Group, a logistics software company. He acknowledges that the


analogy may be a bit of a stretch, but the point remains: software does all the work. “Now you can deal with a


system that is being offered by the LSP, where you can say, ‘Here’s the freight that I want to move, and I’m looking for a quote against my contract, and maybe a spot quote, and if there’s a special offer from


“You can go to Google and enter where you’re going and have all the


options and prices listed right there.” -- Ken Wood, Decartes Systems Group


Your Global Logistics Technology Partner! We Develop, Customize and Implement! Supported Globally by our In-house Experts!


the forwarder that’s available, I want to book it now.’” Chuck Zhao offers a similar a


analogy: doctor’s office


without an appointment desk. Yikes. Imagine what that scene would look like in


Issue 4 2021 - FBJNA


///IT


the supply chain—better yet, don’t. Instead, he says, use software that could precisely manage cargo-movement times. “With every truck driver


that shows up at the warehouse


at a specific


appointment, the traffic jam will suddenly disappear, and truck waiting time will drastically be reduced,” says Zhao, director of Product Performance at CargoSprint. He points to SprintPass,


the Georgia-based company’s dock-management system. Using the software, the driver books an appointment in a time slot the warehouse allocates. The warehouse notifies the driver of said appointment to recover his freight. After that, Zhao says, “He


skips the line and backs up his truck to the dock and gets served right away.” Tom Forbes says these and


other solutions apply just as handily to intermodal and rail.


“Yard automation has


already come a long way,” says Forbes, vice president of Navis Rail, whose systems optimize movements of cranes, boxes, trains and trucks in all types of terminals. “This will eventually lead to much more efficient operations that are extremely safe and will reduce energy use.”


“With every truck driver that shows up at the warehouse at a specific


appoint, the traffic jam will suddenly disappear and truck waiting time will drastically be reduced.” -- Chuck Zhao, CargoSprint


Efficiency Value


Efficiency, all agree, saves resources and time—and nobody needs to be reminded those savings save money. At E2open, Gary Barraco


tells of a customer that needed more efficient oversight of its enormous volumes; through consolidations, the client had suddenly become one of the world’s largest single carrier networks, handling more than 1.5 million containers a year across 120 countries…


and


then the pandemic hit. “Supply


chains are all


fundamentally designed to handle disruptions, routinely adapting to changing conditions,” says Barraco, E2Open’s senior director of Product Marketing. “However, not every supply chain is resilient and agile enough to respond to major disruptions like COVID-19. The pandemic has made supply chains harder to run.” The carrier’s goal was to eliminate manual searches for all those container locations,


“The pandemic has made supply chains harder to run.” - - Gary Barraco, E2open


he says, so E2open provided its Container Management application. Ultimately, the carrier saw


a 10% decrease in empty container moves, saving on depot storage rates, while improving its environmental footprint with significant reductions of carbon emissions, he says. That’s a lot of tangible and


intangible bang for the buck. Then again, software, unlike people, can multitask. Sri Himakuntala,


president & CEO of Intellect Technologies, says, among other


click-of-a-button


chores, software generates standardized shipping documents and electronic transmission, also reducing waste and providing sustainability. In short, he says, IT can


“enable improvements at a moment’s notice to account for every touchpoint in a shipment cycle.”


IT Trends


As for trends, C-suiters point to the sector’s increasing movement into the cloud; adoption of artificial intelligence; machine learning; and, with Big Data growing even bigger, working


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