As the transportation industry digitizes, shippers have more data and opportunities than ever before to gain insights to manage their cargo. While the past few decades have been based on system integration through EDI for shipment transactions and required long development cycles to make system updates, we see a dramatic shift to cloud-native development and APIs for new applications and advanced analytics in 2018.
Today, transportation and logistics professionals can access data from multiple sources and formats, including ocean carriers, terminals, rail, and truckers from the Internet of Things, EDI, and web services to have visibility to their cargo. New technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling solution providers to help shippers manage the data and gain insights from aggregated market data for planning, and to respond quickly to potential disruptions, such as from extreme weather or port congestion, to their shipments in transit. In addition, cloud-native development platforms allow solution providers to develop applications faster and to more easily integrate systems by APIs to share insights throughout the supply chain network.
While switching from EDI transactions to APIs may be fairly straight forward, synthesizing data from multiple sources to augment existing data, increase visibility, and discover insights to save costs and improve reliability requires not only technical expertise, it also requires a deep domain knowledge of transportation networks.
To make the shift from a transactional view to one based on data analytics, we see shippers willing to try new applications that leverage digitization. They are seeking support from their solution providers to discover and adopt new applications that leverage data in new ways to continuously improve their transportation KPIs of on-time deliveries, increased visibility, and minimizing costs.