THE FUTURE OF ACTIVE SUPPLY CHAIN CONTROL
The Enterprise Solutions business segment at SSI SCHAEFER is defined as the logistical control instrument between warehouse, transport, and customer. In short, it is about sustainably and holistically fulfilling customer requests.
EVP Enterprise, Hannes Neubauer, explains how this works in practice and what is behind these intelligent solutions.
What is the idea behind the uniform logistics platform?
Consumer behavior has changed dramatically over the past few years in terms of individualized production, increasing customer expectations, and ever shorter product life cycles. As well as this, classic distribution channels are now only a few of the many ways that goods can be transported to customers. This alters the whole logistics chain and poses many new logistical challenges: Warehouses are supplying directly to customers while shops are becoming increasingly responsible for picking, outbound deliveries, and acting as collection
points for possible customer returns. Forecasting and artificial intelligence (AI) systems are able to anticipate customer demand and trigger an appropriate transfer of goods in the logistics network, in order to ensure that actual customer orders are fulfilled as quickly as possible. This means that an individual warehouse management or transportation management system that only covers one or a few warehouses has a much too limited scope to tackle the challenges of this new world on its own. In order to adapt to these market conditions, it is necessary in the medium term to have – alongside the above-mentioned systems – a central higherlevel logistics planning platform to control all the fulfillment partners in the process chain. The demands being placed on logistics software are increasing as it grows in importance.
What do we need to look out for here?
The planning platform plays a strategic role within these transformative processes in terms of the intelligent networking of material flows, processes, and supply chain partners. It is essential to have a higher-level control system to optimize, control, and monitor all the data and goods flows within the supply chain, in order to be able to clearly trace relevant goods movements and postings. All orders, master data, stock and stock changes, actors, and the status of every stakeholder is linked in real time. This means that the supply chain can be fully and actively checked and controlled. In other words, the logistics platform needs to be understood as a central solution, operating the process chain with the highest efficiency on one hand and preventing possible interface
problems on the other.
How is SSI SCHAEFER optimizing the logistics processes of the future?
At SSI SCHAEFER, it is our clear goal to expand the WAMAS® software suite to include suitable components. This will mean that in the future, our customers will also have overarching control of the supply chain with our holistic software systems. The logistics platform is our way of ensuring the future integration of all our fulfillment partners and to provide our customers with an efficient and effective overall system.