Our world has been rocked to its core by this pandemic. As stay at home orders blanket the globe, the impacts on governments, industries, businesses, institutions large and small have been unilateral and unapologetic.

As we start to come to terms with the “new normal”, we are clearly learning some very good lessons about our current supply chains. Bottlenecks, lack of visibility, blanked sailings, stranded cargo, marine terminal shut-downs, distribution warehouse closures and other logistical challenges are everywhere now. Yet, we have still managed to get critical supply chains flowing to satisfy the needs for food, pharmaceuticals, medical supplies and a host of other essentials for us to live as close to normal as possible. These critical supply chains are made possible by the heroic efforts of our men and women in logistics.

Across the world, governments have made logistics an essential service. The farm workers, the parcel delivery personnel, truck drivers, the longshoremen, vessel crews on cargo ships, depot operations, logistics management setting up supply chain hand offs, to the surge in demand for warehouse distribution center personnel and supermarket front line people all essential in order to deal with the high surges in emergency buying patterns.

When we look at all these people exposed to physical harm, and noting that this pandemic according to medical experts will be far from our last, leads us to think how can we do this better the next time?

Here are some supply chain technologies that could get accelerated in the “new normal”.

Drone Deliveries

Amazon, FedEx, UPS and many others have been starting to work with drone parcel delivery systems. We can clearly see drone food delivery also being interesting here.

Driverless Trucks

Daimler, Tesla, Waymo and Embark all have their hats in the ring on driverless trucks for logistics.

Automated Marine terminals

There are fully automated marine terminals on almost every continent now.

Automated warehouses

IBM, Blue Botics, Right Hand Robotics, Grey Orange and others are already moving in this space.

Smart Containers

Globe Tracker, Emerson, Traxens, Nexxiot, ORBCOMM, IMT, and others are in this space provide GPS location and sensor information from various types of containers globally.

Automated Cargo Vessels

Rolls-Royce and Norwegian shipbuilder Vard Holdings both have demonstrated a fully autonomous vessel concept.

Automated Grocery Pick-up

Cleveron has an automated grocery pick up “TOWER” and Parking lot “Automated Container” for dry and cold chain goods for grocery stores.

Automated grocery picking robot

Walmart and Alert Innovation are testing a grocery picking robot so that staff would only have to assemble the grocery bags all grocery selection would be automated.

All these technologies along with advanced artificial intelligence and other complex software will allow us to automate much more of our supply chains globally. We can clearly see that we are on a track where any future pandemic could rely more on automation processes to kick in at critical periods minimizing how many supply chain heroes we put in harm’s way.

Despite the tragic and life changing results of this pandemic, we must prepare ourselves to limit exposure and loss of life in the future.

Stay home, stay safe and stay healthy!

Sobre el autor

Don Miller

Don Miller

Colaborador de CargoBid, empresario, consultor y cofundador de Greensee.ai

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