From Self-Driving Trucks to Back-Office, automation has been driving efficiency, safety, and sustainability in the freight industry.?
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Automation enhances our capabilities and has significantly transformed our work processes. Here, we will explore ten notable aspects of automation in the freight industry. Some that are here today, others that didn’t work at all, and some that are inevitably coming soon.?
- AMRs: Latest innovations in Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) include a summon-a-robot button, cable detection, clutter navigation and more, which represents the latest growth in smart warehousing (source)?
- Back-Office: Automated accounting systems were first democratized in the 1980s thanks to the rise of personal computers, which then led to industry-specific accounting software in the 90s and 00s. (source)? a) If you’re interested in streamlining your freight brokerage’s back-office, be sure to check out the most configurable back-office automation and carrier payments platform Epay Manager.?
- Blockchain: Innovations in blockchain technology are being integrated in multiple areas of the supply chain, the latest application being final mile delivery which empowers the supply chain by providing real-time tracking and transparency to all stakeholders (source)??
- Digital Freight Matching Platforms: Companies like Convoy (R.I.P), Uber Freight, Transfix, and others, having looked to leverage massive amounts of data and algorithms to match carriers with shippers efficiently, reducing empty miles and optimizing load distribution (source)?
- Drones: Drones have increasingly been implemented in Last Mile Delivery, which is especially helpful in instances where there are traffic challenges and high volumes of packages, with the market size expected to reach $13.32 Billion by 2028 (source)?
- IoT & Telematics: Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies have been increasingly used in fleet management and telematics, which has enabled near-real-time computer vision systems in and around the vehicle aiding in compliance with safety requirements (source)?
- ML & NLP: ?Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have become a powerful and sophisticated tool for logistics companies that connects rule-based human language models with DL, statistical and ML models to better analyze large data sets and provide insights (source)?
- Self-Driving trucks: The first fully functioning commercialized driverless truck began working in Australia in 2008 (source)?
- TMS: The idea for Transport Management Systems (TMS) was first applied by railroad companies in the early 1900s and has now permeated the entire supply chain (source)?
- Warehouse Automation & Robotics: Robotics solutions such as Amazon’s Kiva robots, autonomous forklifts, and robotic arms have revolutionized inventory management and order fulfillment, such as Amazon’s Kiva robots reducing stock retrieval times from 90 minutes to 15 minutes (source)?? Cheers to continued automation innovations! Onward and upward.?
