On Demand News: 02/12/19

How ELDs Changed Everything

(And Also Put The Numb In Numbers)

12 February, 2019 // Stop us if you’ve heard these stories before

- The expedited air shipment arrives at port and then waits days to be consolidated for export.

- A truckload of critical goods arrives at the distribution center on Friday night, but those items still show out of stock until Monday afternoon because the receiving crew doesn’t work weekends.

- The factory works overtime to get out orders, but they sit on the dock because the outbound drivers are out of their hours of service.

These supply chain stories would be funny if they weren’t so painful and common. And, the sad thing is that these issues would be easy to fix if only we had the data to expose them.

If only. Well, careful what you wish for. It’s true that the right information can transform decision-making. But we’re entering an era when data becomes overwhelming. Even with Big Data strategies and artificial intelligence, finding that insight needle in the information haystack is a daunting task.

So writes David Correll, a research scientist at MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, in a recent opinion piece for the Journal of Commerce (“The ELD—Better Trucking Through Data Science,” free access requires registration). Corell points out the value of truck drivers’ electronic logging devices (ELDs) for finding inefficiencies.

But it’s not as easy as just summing up columns and making a few pivot tables. Correll notes that ELDs at the modest-sized trucking companies he has been studying create about 100,000 rows of data per week. That’s a lot of information to parse. And, the situation gets exponentially worse when one tries to synchronize data between suppliers or when those events are combined with ERP data and status from Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

In our practice, we’ve developed two takeaways from the emerging datapocalypse:

1. Enterprises need an end-to-end, cross-partner information platform and strategy. Our sister company, ChronosCloud, has solutions to  integrate the critical, often unconnected endpoints of supply chains with enterprise systems.

2. Even the best systems can be overwhelmed by the sheer number of reports in a global supply chain without a focused strategy. Experts with deep experience transforming supply chains can help define goals and design the right architecture to measure and improve performance.

We’ve designed our own practice around this approach, and we’d love to learn how Morgan analysis and experience might apply to your challenge.

While You Were Shipping…

More Recent Stories You May Have Missed That Caught Our Eye

They Don’t Know What Blockchain Is, But They Know It's Big (Logistics Management). Boston Consulting Group finds blockchain adoption to be sloooow in the supply chain. Roadblocks include lack of trust and coordination within the industry and lack of understanding on the topic. Despite these issues, 88% of execs said blockchain will “disrupt” the industry.

When Paying More for Transportation Pays Off (Supply Chain Quarterly). It doesn’t make writing that check any easier, but at least Supply Chain Quarterly argues that high transit costs have three beneficial effects on overall strategy. Companies shift form offshoring to near-shoring; focus on design for “shipability,” and develop more complex hybrid lean transport / inventory policies.

When Your Driver Unfriends You (Wall Street Journal; tiered subscription access) WSJ’s Logistics Report reports on new features within Uber Freight that allow drivers to rate their loads, recording wait time, dock delays and even reviewing amenities like bathrooms and overnight parking. Other carriers like XPO Logistics and JB Hunt have also experimented with social ratings.