Career
What an exciting year 2018 was in logistics and transportation management! Many companies started to reach beyond traditional strategies and approaches to take their logistics and transportation capabilities to new levels. Ecommerce continued to grow at record levels and there didn’t appear to be the slowdown that many were predicting. There was considerable global trade instability and the focus of many companies was to determine what strategies they needed to put in place to mitigate the brewing trade wars and Brexit uncertainty. Market hype was also at an all-time high, making it harder to identify the best opportunities for technology investments. The question now for logistics and transportation professionals is what will drive 2019 strategies and investments to meet the market challenges and provide the greatest returns.
Here are my thoughts on five key trends for 2019.
Collaborative Transportation Management
The concept has been discussed, but never realized on a large scale. With the capacity shortage continuing for the perceived future, shippers and LSPs are looking for ways to expand their network. Real-time visibility solutions can identify the capacity that is trapped in a given network. New solutions have been developed to allow companies to share capacity and cover a greater percentage of the loads. Work in 2018 has shown that, as the number of participants expand, the ability to dramatically increase available capacity rises. Collaborative transportation management will be the fastest way in 2019 for shippers and LSPs to meet their transportation capacity challenges.