Inbound Logistics | January 2022

drivers, empowering them with navigation, job scheduling, workflow management, and more.

Not all supply chain challenges are new, but some have grown in scale and impact over the past 18 months. These include a lack of actionable data and service quality, maintaining profitability whilemeeting increasingly shorter delivery windows, and the growing need for data privacy, security, and compliance. Several of these friction points can be linked to technical challenges, including a lack of data analytics and visualization in current tools, limited mapping capabilities, the inability to support service app creation and customization, and data enrichment and privacy issues like security breaches. Transportation and logistics providers require safe, reliable, and compliant routes, guaranteed on-time shipping and delivery time windows, thorough analysis of driver behavior and safety levels, improved asset utilization with fewer vehicles, drivers, and vehicle maintenance/downtime, and the ability to drive enhanced business growth and customer satisfaction. Robust, secure, and scalable location platform technologies help address many of these friction points. Highly accurate location data enables critical visibility to make more up-to-date decisions, avoid unnecessary delays, minimize inefficiency, and reduce additional costs. These location solutions empower drivers with enhanced, safer options and a more efficient shift. Transportation and logistics professionals seeking a best-in-class solution should prioritize one that integrates enterprise-grade location data, services, and tools to solve complex logistics problems and uncover new, actionable insights. Location data is integral to every aspect of logistics, from planning to execution and post-trip analysis. Using location data and technology platforms means fleets can quickly and flexibly generate location solutions and insights to match their unique needs across every stage. These include: Service creation and customization: Examples include routing application programming interfaces (APIs), traffic information, and truck restriction information that allow fleets to regularly predict reliable Estimated Times of Arrival, which enable them to deliver goods within committed time windows, improving customer satisfaction. Fleets can customize location services by combining their own data with third-party sources and specifying parameters to create custom business logic to meet their unique business needs. Application software development kits (SDKs): Enable fleets to build tailored mobile solutions for

Analytics and visualization: Fleets can explore, analyze, and visualize location data, prepare and enrich data with location context, and apply machine learning techniques. Managers can use this to boost safety levels, improve usage-based insurance pricing, or support compliance management. Location-centric data and data enrichment: Rich, accurate maps provide the freshest data for fleets, as well as multiple cross-industry datasets, including weather, road conditions, and third-party probe data. These platforms enable integration into existing systems and business processes. Mapping: Private, custommaps using a fleet’s own data—probe data, light detection and ranging data, and sensor data—can be used with location services to enable enterprises to solve complex logistics when there are no maps in the public domain. Data privacy: Comply with government regulations and customer privacy obligations. Solutions can ensure data privacy and compliance, whilemaximizing the utility of big data at scale. Fleets can instill trust across value chain participants and avoid privacy breaches through anonymization and consent management. Exchange and monetization: Provides an additional channel for revenue generation through the datasets. Solutions can act as a neutral environment for pooling datasets across multiple industry participants. Robust and secure location platform technologies that integrate enterprise-grade location data, services, and tools can be used to solve complex logistics problems and uncover new, actionable insights. Dynamic routing based on real-time events allow drivers to minimize delivery times and make more deliveries per shift, maximizing productivity and profitability. A strong location-based solution allows fleet managers to perform driver performance analysis to better understand driver behavior and get a location- centric context of the route. They can rapidly analyze journeys to determine what is impacting performance and quickly provide insights to take swift action for safety, savings, and compliance.

— Susan Beardslee, Principal Analyst, ABI Research

180 Inbound Logistics • January 2022

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