"Foresight and perseverance are required"

Digital technologies promise a better overview of the supply chain, more efficiency, and more time for problem-solving—in other words, more control. Given the current supply chain bottlenecks, all this certainly sounds attractive. But there’s a catch: digital technologies can realize their full value only when they are integrated into processes and workflows in a precisely coordinated manner. Above all, they must offer employees a noticeable reduction in their workload.

For these efforts to succeed, companies not only need to make significant investments in research and development, but they need to have foresight and perseverance as well. Behind the @ILO terminals we describe in this newsletter are four years of collaboration between our DACHSER logistics experts and researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute IML. The real-time tracking of all swap bodies in the DACHSER network, which is anything but trivial, also required plenty of conceptual work in the DACHSER Enterprise Lab.

Ideas become innovations

DACHSER demonstrated the necessary foresight and made ideas and innovation management an executive-level priority nine years ago. We also set up a separate corporate unit for research and development and later established it as an executive unit with expanded responsibilities. Now we are seeing how ideas become innovations that prove themselves in practice—at just the right time. Our digital innovations will enable us to further improve quality and service in groupage, make our delivery operations more sustainable and, last but not least, make the jobs in our company future-proof and attractive.