Supply chain management has lots in common with endurance sports – here’s why
Global logistics industry is taking digital to heart
Supply chains and endurance sports share a lot in common. Bear with me.
A few years ago, a friend of mine suggested we enter an Ironman Triathlon – widely considered one of the most difficult one-day sporting events in the world. Six months prior to the triathlon, we dipped our toes with 100 meter swimming practice.
At first, I was nowhere near prepared to cross the finish line and people much older and younger than me outdid me and passed me left right and center. I reached the other side of the pool completely out of breath. But the best thing about the human body is that you can really guide it to do what you want with enough persistence and effort.
Step-by-step, I went from a novice to being able to swim up to four kilometres.
Why am I talking about my passion for endurance sports? Well, I view supply chain operations in the same way I do the human body. Long before the supply chain challenges of the past four years, it was – and still is – under-appreciated just how many individual operations and activities are needed to get goods and services around the world.
To truly enhance and build the resilience needed in international trade requires effort, persistence and ultimately, a new perspective.
The logistics challenge
Transforming logistics requires addressing the cascade of individual activities that make up the entirety of an end-to-end supply chain operation. That doesn’t happen overnight. A huge number of small activities and handovers take place to deliver the right outcomes for our customers. To improve our operations – like the human body – you need to build the muscle memory of new and enhanced processes over and over again to create the basis for sustainable success.
The revolution in global supply chains must have digital transformation at its centre. The traditional opaqueness of our industry and customers’ requirements for more visibility requires a digital overhaul of our industry’s operations. And that overhaul cannot happen in a silo.
It isn’t just a CIO that can truly influence digital transformations across intermodal logistics.
My title is CFO of Digital Technology and that is an important indicator that CFOs are no longer just financial stewards but also key drivers of innovation and transformation. By leveraging digital tools, data, and automation, CFOs ensure our organisations remain agile, competitive, and future-ready.
I am already steering digital transformation. In practice that means I gather financial and operational data, utilise it properly and analyse results to improve our processes. We start small with experiments to prove our hypothesis and limit the risk exposure.
Where experiments are successful, we want to invest and scale up quickly to make the benefits available to the entire organization.
CFOs play a pivotal role in driving impactful digital transformation, focusing on budgeting and risk evaluation to ensure ROI. However, transformation must serve customers, offering predictability, agility, cost-effectiveness, and sustainable solutions in today’s climate-conscious world.
Bring on the digital makeover
The way we are approaching our transformation at DP World is by engraining digital transformation into our operations to solve our customers’ challenges.
At our ports, we are already geared towards creating new efficiencies with our ‘CARGOES TOS’ software enabling process improvements for more efficient cargo and container handling at port and terminal facilities. We are using the data from our systems in AI/ML models to further optimize our outcomes.
It isn’t just new technologies that can change global supply chains. New processes and ways of operating can build a startup mentality in supply chain operators. Efficiency and disruptive technology led to the creation of BoxBay, a new and intelligent High Bay Storage (HBS) system.
By storing containers up to 11 storey high, BoxBay can deliver the capacity of a conventional terminal in a third of the surface area.
New technologies and processes can build the transparency, operations and reliability that customers are looking for in the global supply chain. We can do so much more in the future from the increased use of IoT devices in our supply chain.
What CFOs in our industry and others need is the confidence to go forward and be emboldened to steer digitalisation strategies, take risks and be encouraged to fail when necessary. Be an agile organization and keep the cost of failure low. Incentivize your workforce to experiment and find new ways to drive better outcomes for the customer. With that dynamism in our hands, we can be much more influential in building resilient, future-ready logistics and operations. Then, we will be prepared for to swim, bike and run the distance.
The writer is CFO of Digital Technology, DP World.
