New technologies—from steam power to modern computers—have been the driving forces in supply chain management since the beginnings of industrialized society. Today, supply chain technology is changing at an exponential rate, providing supply chain planners with possibilities that would have seemed like science fiction even a few decades ago. If you follow the news and trends in SCM, you’ve no doubt noticed that machine learning (ML) is often touted as the next major innovation in this long line of technological evolutions—but what, exactly, is it, and how can supply chain managers put it to use?

Imagine a scenario: Your company has contracted a shipper or freight forwarder to complete a delivery of parts to one of your customers. Because of extensive data-collection during your research and development for the parts, you know that high temperatures over a prolonged period of time can increase the part’s failure rate. As a result of a shipping delay, these parts spend too much time in a container that’s not properly temperature controlled. 

Let’s say you and a coworker are attempting to find areas of waste in your supply chain. You have a large conference table on which you’ve laid a file that contains all of the transport plans utilized by the company for the past few years. When your coworker hypothesizes that a different grouping of goods would improve fuel efficiency, you need new documents with additional information, meaning that you have to leave the conference room and descend to the basement level where the files are kept. By the time you’ve returned, a new idea has occurred to your coworker, and you have to make a new trip to wherever your files are stored in order to retrieve the necessary information. The result of all this walking to and from the files? Some good cardio, but no plan to speak of.

Pop quiz: when’s the last time, either in a personal or a professional capacity, that you made a purchase from a business that did not have a website? Sure, you may have wandered into a charming little brick and mortar store and made an impulse purchase, or maybe you did a bit of antiquing, but I’ll bet that for most major purchases in recent memory you would have been loath to place your trust in a business with no online presence. This is, of course, with good reason. A web presence allows you to read product reviews from other customers, gives you the resources to make more informed purchasing decisions, and lends legitimacy to their enterprise. Once you’ve experienced the added conveniences of a digital business, it’s unlikely you’ll be eager to go back to the old way of doing things.

When we discuss Industry 4.0, we often mention the origins of its name, i.e. the concept of the fourth industrial revolution defined by machine-to-machine communication and autonomous processes. With Logistics 4.0, on the other hand, there is typically no such history lesson involved, perhaps because we think of the new logistics paradigm as fundamentally an outgrowth of Industry 4.0. Whether or not that’s the case, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this new era in logistics is very much its own entity—and it’s already changing the way that shippers and freight forwarders (to say nothing of their customers) do business.

This all begs the question, what are the distinct elements that define Logistics 4.0 systems? How do these elements incorporate the logic of Industry 4.0, and how do they build on the logistics paradigms of the past?

Any production planner who has spent time working on non-clocked production processes can tell you that it presents challenges and hurdles that simply don’t exist on assembly lines or in other linear production processes. And yet, for some manufacturing outfits, non-timed production is the best way to maximize their machine and personnel resources while maintaining a relatively flexible and adaptable production environment. How do we reconcile the difficulty of scheduling production in a job shop with the obvious value that it presents for many businesses, and what can that tell us about the future of job shop scheduling? 

Imagine for a moment that you’re planning to do some small renovations to expand your house. They’re straightforward enough that you can do all of the work yourself, but since you have a day job, you can only do the work at night. What’s the first thing you buy? If you answered floodlights, flashlights, or any other light-emitting piece of equipment, then you have the right mentality for success in the modern supply chain. After all, doing work on a house that you can’t see can be dangerous and inefficient. In the same way, trying to grow your business in spite of low visibility can prove not just difficult, but risky. To prove it, here are five way that end-to-end (E2E) supply chain visibility plays an important role in building a smarter, more efficient business.

Last month, Abu Dhabi Ports introduced a unique blockchain solution, enabling freight forwarders and their customers to digitally check on the statuses of shipments and transports while facilitating real-time tracking of cargo and documents. Officials expect the result to be a more efficient shipping environment in which reduced paperwork and administrative tasks could potentially slash 20% off of physical shipping costs for freight forwarders who take advantage of the new system. While this might seem revolutionary, it’s actually emblematic of shipping trends that have been evolving for some time. Digitization has been increasing for some time, and the world is finally starting to see the results of this paradigm shift.

In order to remain competitive in the world of modern manufacturing, production planners are constantly searching for new ways to derive more value from their operations. This impulse takes many forms, but one of the most common is striving to improve operational capacities, usually by either reducing makespan or improving machine utilization. Though the obvious benefits of increasing your throughput may seem tantalizing, the process of actually doing so is not as simple as ratcheting up production speed or buying new machines. Rather, it is a complex process that requires a high degree of visibility into your value stream. To help you tackle these complexities, here are 5 key strategies for improving operational capacities.  

As experts tout the possibilities of Industry 4.0 for reshaping the world of manufacturing, it’s quickly becoming clear that the changes and paradigm shifts will not be limited to the factories in which they originate. Shipping, logistics, and commerce in general will all feel the effects of the fourth industrial revolution in numerous ways, some predictable and some not. One thing that Industry 4.0 has rapidly made clear, however, is that the age old distinction between providers of goods and providers of services is little more than an elaborate fiction. Even if you’re an OEM providing smaller parts for other business’s production streams, in the modern era you’re still essentially a service provider, offering delivery of parts at the agreed upon time and support throughout the parts’ life cycles in order to facilitate an ongoing relationship that bolsters existing production cycles.