In 2018, the industry will continue exploring the application of new technology and gear up their organizations for digitalization of container shipping.
Although it is still early days in knowing clearly how all these investments by industry incumbents and externally funded start-ups will play out, there’s general consensus that if the manual processes and fragmented systems that have proliferated across the shipping industry for years can be digitized, then there is a significant opportunity to deliver a far better customer experience for the end-users and make the industry far more efficient.
One thing is clear, for the industry to be successful in managing any kind of long-term transformation, significant management and leadership skills will be required to shape organizations to be more flexible, adapt to change, and be more open to collaboration. Working as one entity on a common technology platform with a single source of the truth is a first step toward more integrated planning and execution and more productive and profitable business processes.
But technology alone is not enough — successful transformation requires the ability to understand and address the business process issues, and have the people and expertise to implement solutions into the organization that will support new business processes.
Digitalization means a change in behavior not only within one part of the industry, but across industry enterprises, ocean carriers, terminals, ports, shippers, and their technology providers. Most of the inefficiencies are in the interaction between different shipping parties, and it will be the ability of the industry to find an approach to collaborate and be prepared to change internal processes so that planning and execution processes can be synchronized across the end-to-end supply chain.