The evolution of technology in logistics industry

Implementing technology innovations is creating a big movement among industries, especially in the logistics sector. But, is every logistics and forwarder agent adapting to these changes? And do all logistics and freight forwarder agents see the evolution of technology as a real improvement to its company?

Those were the topics of our conversation with Sarah Barnes-Humphrey from ShipZ, at our Forwarders Online Conference. 

The evolution of technology in logistics

As we know, working in the logistics industry involves a lot of heavy work, and technology is a great ally to help improve and optimize the job. 

For the past five years, technology has evolved in areas like artificial intelligence, automation, and database analysis, to name a few. Click here to know 5 logistics trends for 2022 you should keep an eye on.

With all this evolution, some logistics companies held on to it and started to grow and improve their business. 

Sarah gave us a really good insight about the evolution of technology in logistics adapting to the industry:

“The last five years has really driven innovation in this space, and I think it’s a mixture of people looking to make things more efficient and less manual and also the driven force from our generation and below saying that there is a better way of doing the work, we can’t do it traditionally anymore”. 

But the number of people that are really engaged in the forwarder and logistic industry evolution is still low compared to what technology has to offer.

And that was the main point of our conversation with Sarah, there are some tools offered by technology that shouldn’t be a matter of question in a freight forwarding company, as in having a good website, which is one of the main contacts that any company will have with yours. 

That is why Sarah’s insight was so important and rich to us, we are living the evolution of technology in logistics and in the forwarding business. Therefore we need to use it in our favor in order to bring efficiency and optimization to the processes inside the freight forwarder company. 

The gains you have while using technology in your forwarder

Other than that, there are other ways technology can help logistics and forwarder businesses to be more efficient, according to Fundação Getúlio Vargas, at each 1% a company increases in its technology investments, the profit of the company in a period of two years increases by 7%. You wouldn’t want to miss out on that, right?

Besides being able to increase the profit of your freight forwarder company, with technology the job can get faster, easier, and optimized, which automatically leads to an increase in the business. 

So we concluded that nowadays it is not a matter of “do I want to use technology in my forwarder company?” but “I how can I use technology in my freight forwarder company?”

Keep in mind that technology shouldn’t be an enemy, with technology you can save time and money, which means more profit and less work without losing the traditional side, but complementing it. However, it shouldn’t be about having to implement technology innovations on your forwarding company, but how technology can actually help you to improve one of the processes inside your freight forwarder that nowadays can be challenging.

Freight forwarder challenges that technology in logistics can solve

For example, one of the biggest challenges freight forwarders have been facing on a daily basis is finding qualified forwarder partners and forwarder partners management. Gladly technology is a big help to freight forwarders when it comes to these matters.

1. Finding qualified forwarder partners:

As you know there are many ways to resort to finding forwarders to partner with, such as Google, logistics directories, and logistics networks, which can be time-consuming. However, with help from the advance of technology in logistics, there is a better option for you to find qualified partners in only a couple of clicks, and that is Parnity.

Parnity is the digital logistics network updated to today’s forwarding and logistics industry. At Parnity you can search for your next partner in over 75 countries with more than 150 agents and filter the searches by type of cargo, country, city, services, company name, branch office, or head office.

There is also the possibility of checking each forwarder’s profile with its complete information, the company description, logistics certification, photos, videos, the services the company offers, branch office, quotation contacts, and the documents the forwarder has uploaded in order to be a member of Parnity’s network.

2. Freight forwarder partners management:

Along with finding forwarders, keeping track of your current ones is pretty challenging. Some forwarders use spreadsheets to keep track of all partners and some don’t have any kind of control, and that only delays new partnerships to be made.

One of the best solutions offered in the freight forwarding industry to solve partnership management problems is Parnity’s management system, called MyPartners. Parnity’s management system gives forwarders the power of:

• Organize current freight partners through a CRM board by country, modal, service, quality, or… whatever you want.

• Add new partners to your OWN logistics network. Find a forwarder on Parnity’s search in a lane that you haven’t developed yet, and add them to YOUR OWN partner’s list.

• Rank your forwarder partners from top to bottom using your own personalized criteria, either by country, modal, service, or whatever you want.

• Visualize your forwarder partners in a single place, you can choose to view them on a single list, or you can see them divided by lists of country.

• Analyze your current partnerships, upload your current partnerships data to get access to a business intelligence tool, and be able to analyze all your forwarders partnerships data. 

To know more about Parnity and how it can help you to solve the challenges of the forwarding industry click here.

To sum up

Technology indeed can bring many benefits to your freight forwarding company, however, you must bear in mind the best way to use it in your favor.

Check out the video below if you want to see the complete conversation we had with Sarah Barnes-Humphrey and her point of view on the future of the logistics market.