| |December 20199Real time monitoring and control of routes taken by delivery vans for security, cost optimization and service excellence are key to the success of the business in today's fast paced worldness certificates, annual maintenance contracts and other predefined statu-tory documents aiding the data avail-ability from compliance and tracking perspective. This can be further ex-tended on challans, invoices and de-livery sheets too.Efficiency and Consistency with reduced time to accomplish the given task than humans is the advantage of having robots do routine and mun-dane tasks on floor. A leading ecom-merce vendor uses robots, to fulfill orders in 75% less time without any latency or delays thereby reducing the companies operational costs by 20 percent. Cobots are human assisted machines which are generally used in sorting and packaging activities in warehouses. Cobots help the compa-nies in not only reducing operating costs but also increases productivity and reduces errors.Artificial intelligence bundled with Virtual reality can be used for tracking the shipments in a ware-house without error and ensuring "Vision based Pickups". This is re-ferred to as Augmented Reality. DHL, the world's leading logistics company, has successfully carried out a pilot project testing smart glasses and augmented reality in a warehouse in the Netherlands. The technology was used to implement `vision pick-ing' in warehousing operations. Staff was guided through the warehouse by graphics displayed on the smart glass to speed up the picking process and reduce errors. The pilot proved that augmented reality offers added value to logistics and resulted in a 25 percent efficiency increase during the picking process.Imagine a portal for transporters association where the transporter can optimize availability of transports by predicting demands in advance can give optimum returns to transport-ers. Also, ensure that the return jour-neys are equipped with shipments to gain advantage over empty returns. Fuel monitoring sensors are a key to transporters to avoid losses resulting out of fuel theft. Similarly, the fuel stations are bridging the gap of fuel theft by using RFID stickers which are read at the fuel stations by the dispensers thereby identifying the ve-hicle and its pre-registered electronic payment details and thereby giving a complete visibility of amount of fuel dispensed with the cost incurred. Various technologies and systems have been generating data for years now and a thorough churning of data to convert it into useful information will require analytical technologies that can give insights into past trends and predict the future opportunities. Once such example is route planning and scheduling. Excessive research is in progress to use machine learning algorithms on past data and predict the most optimum route coverage for a delivery vehicle. Adding the in-tegration with the national agencies for weather predictions can avoid the impact on the operations and losses or damages to the property caused due to bad weather. Availability of drivers across the global logistics industry is reducing due to the fact that the next genera-tions of today's drivers do not want to get into the same profession. This has an impact observed across the countries globally. Cyber Physi-cal Systems bundled with Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Sensing devices can lead to driverless vehicles. Research on consumer vehi-cles is already in progress by the likes of Tesla and Ford. Soon, the gap will be bridged and we might see com-mercial and transport vehicles getting into the trend.Movement and transfer of ship-ments between hubs and warehous-es result in a huge vehicular traffic thereby increasing the carbon emis-sion levels on the globe. With Drones as an efficient delivery mechanisms, last mile deliveries and movement between hubs and warehouses can be well managed without increasing the carbon footprint. Support to the customers or part-ners is a key to success for a business. Bots is a forward looking solution for support which can even operate us-ing voice like the one in Google as-sistant or Alexa for a predefined set of queries. Using Natural Language Processing and artificial intelligence, the bots can learn to communicate with the customers and partners for queries and alerts driven from the system.Alignment of logistics processes involving warehouses, transport-ers and field operations along with technological advancements in the fields of automation can result in re-duced delivery times, improved pre-dictability and quality, optimization of resources and positive satisfac-tion across the customers and part-ners community giving a win-win proposition for all.
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