Supply Chain Asia, Singapore: Cognizant’s Assistant Vice President of Enterprise Application Services Consulting Outlines an E-Commerce Roadmap for the Shipping Industry
 |
“It is now imperative for every shipping company to evaluate its status-quo business model and chalk out a roadmap to digitize its operations and services to establish better customer connect and optimize costs,” writes Badrinath Setlur. “This is expected to have a profound impact on global shipment execution, trade management, shipment visibility, and trade compliance capabilities on a unified platform.” Excerpts:
“A study of global CXOs of shipping liners, agents and global freight forwarders, technology providers and industry analysts has revealed that most stakeholders recognize the significance of what is beginning to be labelled as “connected shipping” and have already commenced their journey on the digital path. Three-fourths of the respondents agreed that e-commerce is ‘business-critical’ for their organizations over the next three to five years. More than half of the respondents have an e-commerce solution in some stage of development.
How can shipping companies truly reorient to serve the new digital landscape of their customers? The first step in embarking on an e-commerce transformation roadmap is an assessment of the current state. Shipping company stakeholders must base their assessment on the following key functions along the value chain: capacity planning and forecasting; order management; shipment planning and scheduling; and supply chain visibility to freight invoicing management and analytics. Using the Connected Shipping Maturity Assessment Framework, a shipping company can assess where its critical functional processes stand within four dimensions of maturity: Defined, Managed, Optimized and Transformed.
A current state assessment can help establish basic capabilities in process standardization, data integrity and visibility before expanding further. It can also fully leverage technologies to automate all operations and critical business processes. This framework, developed based on the aforementioned research, can act as a guideline for charting a meaningful and contextual roadmap. Respondents’ experiences and feedback provide valuable insights on the level of importance shipping companies assign to staying connected and becoming digital in the coming years.
Any e-commerce roadmap being prepared for digital transformation will not be complete without aligning business processes and key stakeholders. This is one critical area where several transformation efforts fail, and which must be managed effectively. It is important to enable collaborative business processes to support the exchange of data, events and documents. To successfully pivot to a digitally-enabled enterprise, the company must facilitate true partnering through timely, accurate information-sharing and visibility.
An RoI-based approach to identifying and prioritizing initiatives is essential to generate sufficient buy-in from leadership. In the process of defining a business case, companies can benchmark their business KPIs to focus on an action plan for moving towards a fully matured business process stage. This also enables a laser focus on key outcomes from the transformation process, and ensures such efforts do not deviate from the scope or budgeted outlays.
Cheaper devices, ubiquitous connectivity, rapidly transforming customer expectations, and an increasing breakdown of traditional business barriers are disrupting practically every business around the world. Shipping — which is the backbone of global trade — is hardly immune from this tide of changes. A timely transformation to adopt digital processes, guided by the right roadmap towards these outcomes, will help shipping companies ride up to the crest and stay there.”
Click here or below to read the article.
