Webinar Takeaways
Building Supply Chain Resilience: The Right Balance of Human and Tech in Transportation
Transportation management has historically been about building healthy relationships. It’s no surprise that the perceived nature of the industry makes digital transformation seem detrimental to the personal relationships brokers have spent years developing. However, outside influencers such as continuous supply chain disruptions, including capacity, shipping and cost challenges, necessitate automation and intelligence.
Evan Armstrong from Armstrong & Associates, Greenscreens’ Dawn Salvucci-Favier, Lindsay Watt from Parade, and 3GTMS’ Stephanie Richelieu Stagger discuss how digitalization strengthens the human element of freight brokering while building resilience to cope with changing times.
In the TIA Lunch and Learn session, the expert team shared that while businesses are digitalizing processes to varying degrees, some still resist full digitalization to protect the human element of transportation management. Salvucci-Favier shared a story about a client that faced an aggressive growth path and took a sensible approach to digitalization. The conversation continued as the panel shared insights about the seamless connectivity required to keep the supply chain ecosystem in sync. Watt references wrapping solutions around the Jobs-to-be-Done lens and framework.
Interesting perspectives took shape when the conversation turned to protecting the human element of transportation management while digitizing to meet customer demand. Richelieu Stagger talked about the tech-savvy workforce’s ability to take on strategic efforts that improve efficiency and customer relationships. Digitalization helps businesses automate the mundane so that human capital can focus on more appealing strategic activities. Armstrong shared Armstrong & Associates’ benchmarks of revenue per person per year after digitalization – “the traditional benchmark was $1 million per person per year in terms of gross revenue. Based on our current sampling, this is up to about $1.59 million per person per year. We think if you digitalize to take care of mundane processes and improve how you manage relationships, we see the new goal is $2 million to $ 4 million per person per year.”
The discussion continued through the challenges and opportunities as brokers and 3PLs adopt a digital freight management model backed by new technologies, such as hyper-automation 2.0, next-gen robotics, and analytics to respond to disruptions. The future of digital freight management and possible downfalls of digitalization closed out the interactive and timely session.