The Journey To Predictability

Since the beginning of the e-commerce era, retailers have been thrust into a never-ending competition to provide shorter delivery windows. In many ways, securing customer loyalty meant winning the service level agreement (SLA) race — or at the very least, keeping pace with your competition.

These competitive pressures provided the impetus for a digital transformation in the supply chain and material handling sector, where many retailers are in various states of transition from manual processing to an increasingly automated paradigm.

BUT THERE’S STILL MUCH WORK TO BE DONE HERE.

A recent study of supply chain and operations professionals revealed that 95 percent of survey respondents are not fully capitalizing on the benefits of digital technologies, including:

• Physical and mechanical innovations such as robotics, advanced automation and augmented reality
• Informational and analytical innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and the industrial internet of things (IIoT) on which they rely

At the heart of this challenge is our industry’s relationship with operational data, which compared to other sectors, has been relatively slow to utilize and reap its many benefits. Data utilization is foundational to making a successful transition into the future of e-commerce, not only from a digital transformation perspective, but also in our ability to meet the challenges that await us.