Companies have increasingly been adopting newer technologies in recent months to get a jump start after the Covid-19 slump. With customer demand being so volatile in many industries, it has often been a task for 3PL and 4PL companies to adjust their business processes to combat these disruptions. Business closures, along with work from home policies, have skyrocketed the e-commerce industry and have increased the importance of customer-first standards. People are working from home more and as a result using home appliances more and more. This increased use has led to a spike in demand for companies such as GE. As Melanie Cook, COO of GE pointed out in this Wall Street Journal article, “We literally cannot keep up with the demand. We’ve invested, added capacity, and we’re still flat out”. In response to the initial surge of the pandemic, GE Appliances responded by investing in technologies that track shipments from manufacturing plants in real-time and anticipate disruptions that could slow customer deliveries.
Before the pandemic, only 25% of logistics providers were leveraging digital technologies according to Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics. Fraunhofer found that now “75% see digitization as a way to either replace existing analog processes with digital ones or support new processes for customers within their existing operations”. According to a different article from Logistics Viewpoints “As supply chain managers decrease their focus on exception management and tactical intervention, they can devote their time and attention to more strategic activities”. Both articles are suggesting that the companies that will come out of this pandemic on top will be the ones that invest in digitization to stay agile, resilient, and responsive to changes.
StrataFlows is designed to effortlessly handle exceptions and disruptions, so you can spend more time and attention on more strategic activities. Since the StrataFlows platform is cloud-based, it can be accessed from anywhere: the factory floor, the comfort of home, and anywhere else your business takes you. Our platform is an incident command center allowing users to have end-to-end real-time visibility when a part goes missing or a supplier is late during changes in supply. We help clients stay resilient in these times by keeping production flowing by tracking suppliers and issues, and we give them the tools they need to act. The Issue Tracker module, along with its built-in reporting and dashboarding capabilities, helps our clients be responsive to change and continuously improve towards their goals by giving them visibility and collaboration tools to stay agile in a changing market. Click here to for a free trial of StrataFlows.
