Logistics services doesn’t mean only transferring goods from one location to another. It compresses of main key components like warehouse & distribution, inventory management, order fulfillment, supply chain management, customs clearance and compliance, reverse logistics, information management, packaging and labeling, risk management. These are very crucial to manage and to meet the customer demands.
Apart from these, Africa experiences set of challenges from infrastructure to various economic conditions. They are fragmentated with multiple languages, cultures which makes it difficult for logistic services to operate across different region. They also face shortage of skillful people in logistics industry and lack of finance for upgrading.
They faced massive damage to global supply chains after covid-19, with increased demands for goods post lockdown. After the lockdown, the logistic market has set back their market, tending to repair. The company started to increase data driven solution with artificial intelligence to identify the potential risk and under performance in the supply chain which helped them to manage their warehouse by predicting about the supplies.
With the improved digital transformation, AI could predict the forecast demand, cost and risk in advance. There are always issue in the security theft, the problem has been solved by using IOT (Internet of Things) to ensure when their parcel left the warehouse and delivery date to predicted earlier. Technologies has grown to help customer and business to ensure their security. African also implemented blockchain technology to track the transaction from tracking packages to business transaction. All the transaction are stored in database to be retrieved later if required.
The product sent from one place to another requires proper packaging solutions and proper address details to ensure safe transportation of the product. The manual way of accessing data is very tedious task, the use of data analytics for demand forecasting and inventory management to enhance efficiency and performance of supply chain. The historical data and real time data helps in analyzing the meaningful insight. Growth of E-commerce is driving the world, with the integration of logistic service with E-commerce creates an increased demand. So, with the help of advanced technologies, partners are under pressure to provide flexible and adaptive solution.
In conclusion, every business has their own strategy to stand the competitive edge in the marketplace. The logistic services are emerging toward the better future with help of smart technology like blockchain and IOT. Besides that, the infrastructure and finances aid can also be improved with the help of government – private partnership.
