Five Stops on a Road Map to the ‘Perfect Order’
Market volatility has eased somewhat relative to levels seen in the past three years, but the operational demands and customer expectations from an acceleration of omnichannel e-commerce — now around 20% of retail shipments and growing at ~10% annually — are here to stay.
Managing this growth over time will entail data-driven solutions, to assess and respond to disruption early and orchestrate workflow to steadily improve performance and drive ROI. Conventional manual processes simply can’t handle the dramatically greater volumes of freight and data variables that tomorrow’s supply chains face, especially with the same or fewer workers and constrained assets.
Planning for longer-term growth and competitiveness in this environment will require the right kind of road map to inform decisions about staffing, technology deployment, the pace of achieving scale and more. It begins with a full assessment of the business’ current state relative to the end state it hopes to achieve three, five or 10 years out, and milestones for reasonably, profitably achieving the target.
A lot depends on the digital “maturity” an organization has at the beginning, its tolerance for risk and its willingness as an organization to embrace both operational and structural change. A higher level of maturity is required for the continuous flows of smaller, more frequent parcel shipments in omnichannel fulfillment, especially in the complex, costly and crucial final mile.
Existing road maps to maturity focus on logistics, the warehouse and even e-commerce more broadly, yet leave critical gaps in understanding the specific path to achieving final-mile digital maturity. Cloud-based parcel shipping solutions platform Pierbridge, part of the Wisetech Global group, now offers a new Fulfillment and Final-Mile Maturity Model, to complement others in the market. Take a tour of the five stages of maturity.
