Innovation-driven logistics: the new revolution
Up until a few years ago, it was normal to wait at least two days before receiving an online purchase. That waiting time has now dropped to as little as two hours. For some companies an almost natural evolution with costs perfectly under control, is still for many others an impossible dream, presenting them with a real competition problem. The new benchmarks can only be adopted by companies that have invested a lot of time and resources to make it possible, or they must pass on the extra costs to customers, who understandably are not willing to pay them.
The role of Amazon in this transition is huge: the company, which suffered a 4% fall in its stock market valuation yesterday after presenting higher-than-expected profits but revenues that disappointed the analysts, has become the figurehead of a movement that is rethinking logistics to include technologies that include from robots, drones or radical self-service, to no less than flying warehouses and tunnels. Patents that would sound like science fiction in another context, take on a different order when the company applying for them has managed to get things I need to my house at a click, more than twenty kilometers from the center of Madrid, in less than two hours. That’s a point where electronic commerce is not just electronic commerce anymore, and becomes magic.
The company has just announced the construction of a $1.5 billion, 900 acres air logistics center next to a Kentucky airport that will generate 2,700 full-time and part-time jobs, which should silence critics who dismiss the developments in logistics as so much smoke and mirrors. Amazon is leading is a revolution built, to a large extent, on logistics.
Meanwhile, other companies are exploring and deploying alternatives such as ground transportation robots for short-haul delivery, while new competitors are emerging with using a platform-based approach, and at the same time, the availability of rapid logistics has been identified as one of the defining characteristics that identify the most desirable areas of our cities.
Logistics is in the front line of a very real revolution, one that is making obsolete many traditional approaches and that will dramatically alter the nature of competition in many industries. If the fundamental structure of the logistics of your business have not changed much in recent years, you might need to consider that there is something you could be doing better.
(En español, aquí)
