2024 IL MARKET RESEARCH: LOGISTICS IT STEPS UP
Mergers and acquisitions 1 %
Most of the growth that logistics IT vendors enjoyed over the past year came from organic sales. Eighty-five percent of survey respondents told us their companies are growing stronger thanks to revenue from customers. Another 14% attribute their growth to a combination of sales and merger and acquisition activity, while just 1% have M&A entirely to thank. n GROWTH: What led to growth in the past year?
Both 14 %
Organic sales 85 %
OVERCOMING COMPLEXITIES Volatile conditions pose all sorts of challenges these days for supply chains. “There are so many possibilities of things that can go wrong in a big way or a small way,” says Seth Patin, founder and CEO of LogistiVIEW in Cary, North Carolina. These issues may concern the workforce, trading partners, supply chain disruptions, geopolitical disruptions, or many other factors. For example, one LogistiVIEW customer, a large industrial distributor, found it difficult to manage workflow in the
challenges, including: the complexity of the requirements companies need to fulfill; cybersecurity;
the need for a resilient supply chain; and the difficulties of ordinary, day-to-day logistics operations. To help with those issues and more, Odyssey is investing in technology that harmonizes the disparate data that streams in from carriers, trading partners, and myriad other sources, so it can extract actionable intelligence from those raw materials. “We’re spending an enormous amount of money on our IT systems right now, including a better data model and a data warehouse—the path that converts all that data into a structured environment, so we can then unleash AI and machine learning, and take advantage of those gains for customers,” says Glenn Riggs, Odyssey’s chief strategy officer. For companies that want to use AI to automate supply chain decision making, one big challenge is determining how far to trust the recommendations AI systems provide. A human who analyzes data can explain the reasoning behind a recommendation and be responsible for the outcome. “When an AI engine or a model tells you something, there is not the same transparency or trust,” says Ram Krishnan, global head, customer success at Aera Technology in Mountain View, California. To earn customers’ trust, Aera has designed its decision automation software to document the path to each decision. Say Aera’s platform recommends a particular routing strategy for a load. “We provide the underlying visibility, underlying traceability, all the way to a transaction,” Krishnan says. “It provides what I call a data genealogy to the decision maker, so they have full confidence in that decision.”
warehouse in the face of varying customer demand. “One of their biggest challenges was getting enough work released to keep all their people busy in all their different, complex picking zones, but not overwhelm their downstream conveyors or their picking, packing, sortation, and labeling operations,” Patin says. LogistiVIEW’s warehouse execution solution works with the warehouse management system to help the company strike the right balance. Shippers also face variability when choosing transportation modes for their loads. “The availability, the capacity, and the cost structures are in flux,” says Brian Smith, CEO of Banyan Technology in Westlake, Ohio. For example, parcel carriers will accept certain loads today that they wouldn’t have one year or 18 months ago. Can a shipment travel most efficiently by parcel, less-than-truckload, full truckload, or intermodal carrier? The answer changes over time with fluctuating rates, accessorial charges, and other factors. Banyan’s freight execution software helps companies manage that variability. “Users can simultaneously pull back rate and load attribute data, transit time, etc. for all over-the- road modes, so they can make the best decision based on current rates,” Smith says. At Odyssey Logistics in Danbury, Connecticut, recent customer surveys reveal several important supply chain
50 Inbound Logistics • April 2024
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