The past year has opened the door to many risks—and response strategies—that supply chain leaders must now keep top of mind when making critical inventory, demand, logistics, and pricing decisions.

STOCKPILING AND DEMAND VOLATILITY

A wave of organizations took up the practice of stockpiling over the past year to mitigate demand and offset transportation shortages and rising prices. However, this practice can often create more headaches than it alleviates. There are costs associated with stocking extra inventory, which may very well end up being passed on to the consumer.

In this scenario, supply chain leaders should look to a more active approach to demand management to help mitigate excess inventory and avoid passing added costs on to the consumer. Identify the demand signals that are critical to your business—whether raw point-of-sale data, social sentiment, or socioeconomic data—and then align on the actions you can take to actively shape demand to account for your increased inventory.

The challenges of the past year have also demonstrated how reliant organizations across industries are on a well-run ecosystem of suppliers, manufacturers, and logistics providers.

This ecosystem is often a global one, and while that can help with supply chain diversification, it can also lead to bottlenecks and disruptions—from tariffs and political negotiations that impact trade routes, unplanned weather events, or COVID flare-ups that can lead to factory or border closures, or temporary reduction of capacity.

Supply chain leaders can better prepare for unplanned disruptions by embedding more agility and visibility into their global ecosystem. Leveraging end-to-end supply chain management technology to share data across the supply chain in real time can help replan if downtime hits a supplier, or a factory is closed in a region. It is easier to change course on the fly, mitigate potential risk, and drive forward.

FREIGHT AND LOGISTICS

While it may have worked in the past, making assumptions at the beginning of the year about freight capacity, driver and warehouse availability, or associated costs, is no longer an option. Instead, supply chain leaders are tasked with navigating increases in shipping volume and diesel prices, a capacity squeeze, and a driver shortage—and that doesn’t account for unplanned disruptions.

Strong forecasting capabilities can help supply chain leaders more accurately predict their freight needs, and when combined with real-time visibility, can help make trade-off decisions to expedite or change lanes. They can also use more accurate forecasting to make pricing and promotion decisions that shape prime shopping windows and alleviate a potential logistics crunch in the future.

INTERACTION EFFECTS AND SCENARIOS

Often, these risks are scored or assessed independently, but never frequently compounding at the same time. Traditional risk management approaches often do not assume interaction effects, which leaves businesses more exposed when their often linear, discrete assumptions interact and produce far higher, or lower, outcomes than anticipated.

To counter, a robust and configurable scenario management approach that hinges on identifying “potential” interactions and elevating them for CXOs to review can help business leaders understand potential interactions and prepare for destabilizing options.

Author: Evan Quasney, Global VP of Supply Chain Line of Business, Anaplan

Source: www.inboundlogistics.com

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The new guidance is designed to help to accelerate the transition towards safer and more resilient supply chains, while supporting Covid-19 response and recovery efforts.

Digital innovations are helping the air transport sector to transition away from paper-based documents used to facilitate the movement of global airfreight, promoting a contactless air cargo environment and greater cross-border trade resilience in the face of future pandemic threats.

In line with the recommendations of the ICAO Council’s Aviation Recovery Task Force (CART), the specifications aim to help reduce physical contact among international trade and transport professionals, and in so doing better protect the fluidity of cross-border trade and international transport operations from pandemic-related restrictions.

“The latest innovations reflect ICAO’s integrated, collaborative, and multilateral approach to transport policies encompassing air cargo and mail supply chains, and will play an important part in addressing both current and future pandemic risks,” highlighted ICAO secretary general Juan Carlos Salazar. “It’s our expectation that they will help address the tremendous double strain now being placed on global supply chains, whether by the COVID-19 pandemic itself, or the incredible surge in international e-commerce which has accompanied it.”

ICAO’s collaboration with UNECE on supply chain digitalisation is an outcome of the Joint Statement on the Contribution of International Trade and Supply Chains to a Sustainable Socioeconomic Recovery in COVID-19 Times, which was signed by eight UN agencies in September 2020.

Digital specifications will now replace the formerly paper-based Air Waybill (AWB), Dangerous Goods Declaration (DGD), and the Consignment Security Declaration (CSD). These in turn form part of a broader suite of deliverables for multimodal transport data sharing, applicable to air, road, rail, maritime and inland water transport.

Source: www.aircargo.com

Image: www.pexels.com

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The milestone demonstrates the disruptive technology concept works, and makes possible dramatic changes to the way containers are handled in ports around the world. Construction of the test facility with 792 container slots was completed in July last year in Terminal 4 of Jebel Ali Port in Dubai.

BoxBay is a patented automated container handling system that stores containers up to eleven stories high in steel racks. It delivers more than three times the capacity of a conventional yard, so the footprint of terminals can be reduced by up to 70 percent. The system is designed to run automatically and enables any container to be accessed individually without moving any other.

Traditionally containers are stacked one on top of the other in rows meaning many containers have to be moved to access containers lower down in the stacks. BoxBay is designed to be fully electrified and can be powered by solar panels on its roof.

The technology behind BoxBay was originally developed by SMS Group for handling of metal coils that weigh as much as 50 tonnes in racks as high as 50 metres. The system will be demonstrated to the public during “EXPO2020” in Dubai in October 2021.

Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, Group Chairman and CEO of DP World, said: “The completion of the first 10,000 moves demonstrates that the BoxBay concept works in the real world. This technology has the potential to revolutionise how ports and terminals operate around the world. BoxBay adds value for our operations and customers and demonstrates DP World’s strengths as a global provider of smart and innovative logistics solutions”.

Mathias Dobner, Chairman and CEO of BoxBay, said: “We have been making great progress in setting up the system in Terminal 4. Usually, when setting up a new plant or system, you first have to run practical tests to find out where further optimization will be needed – especially, when the system you are building is the very first one of its type, as is the case with BoxBay. In order to enhance the reliability of the technology, we have been thoroughly analyzing the information collected by our warehouse management system. These were immense amounts of data. But they enabled us to make adjustments continuously wherever necessary. BoxBay has set out to revolutionize global supply chains”

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It was the first time in the history of its operations that Emirates had operated a cargo only flight on a passenger aircraft.

Coming just four days after Covid-19 had been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO), EK 2503 would be the first of more than 27,800 cargo flights to be operated by Emirates SkyCargo in the year that followed as the cargo carrier worked ceaselessly to keep communities across the world connected to the essential medical and food supplies they needed during the pandemic.

Nabil Sultan, Emirates divisional senior vice president, Cargo said: “It has been exactly one year since what was considered impossible in the air cargo industry became not just a reality but a strong operational pillar for Emirates SkyCargo. Prior to the pandemic, nearly two thirds of our total cargo was transported in the bellyhold of our passenger flights. With increasing flight suspensions and restrictions on passenger travel imposed due to COVID-19 in early March 2020, we could foresee a situation where there would no longer be adequate cargo capacity available in the market to transport essential supplies.

“In order to bolster the cargo capacity offered by our 11 Boeing 777 freighters and make sure that we could meet the urgent demand for goods such as PPE, ventilators and other pharmaceutical goods and food supplies from across the world, we proactively made a radical and innovative plan to utilise our widebody passenger aircraft to operate cargo only flights. We trialled this passenger freighter concept with a flight to Kuwait on 16^th March last year. Over the next few weeks, as regular passenger operations were completely suspended, we started increasing our passenger freighter flights to a point where we had close to 90 passenger aircraft being used for cargo operations.

“Our team worked tirelessly to flesh out a new business model from the ground up- seeking approvals from authorities, drawing up a new route network, drafting new operational and safety guidelines and speaking to our customers around the world – to make sure that as a socially responsible carrier, we were able to maintain essential supplies of cargo into markets and at the same time sustain exports around the world in challenging economic conditions.

“Our passenger freighter strategy has been the backbone of our operations during the pandemic transporting cargo to more than 125 destinations across six continents. It has showcased our resilience as a global facilitator of trade and supply chains. With resumption and growth in passenger operations, we have started gradually moving towards our traditional model but our passenger freighters continue to remain a strong component of the COVID-19 pandemic response.”

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The shipping line said in a statement that, “2020 was another successful year for MSC’s reefer services as we battled the Covid pandemic to continue delivering essential food and medicine. As a world leader in refrigerated transport solutions, we operate one of the largest and most advanced reefer container fleets in the world: in 2020, MSC shipped a record 1.9m reefer containers.”

Global demand for fresh fruit has grown by as much as 40% over the last decade. This has been intensified in 2020 by a greater demand for immunity boosting foods rich in vitamin C, such as fresh fruit, as part of a growing trend in personal health and nutrition, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Reefer containers and temperature-controlled solutions have gained popularity over the course of 2020. The growing demand has also opened up new market possibilities, which we have been able to support thanks to our continued investment in the best technologies for refrigerated transport solutions,” explained Giuseppe Prudente, MSC’s global logistics director.

In 2020, MSC made the first shipment of Chilean clementines to Hong Kong, connecting Asia and Latin America through INCA Service. Shortly thereafter, MSC delivered the first shipment of avocados from Colombia to China, a journey made possible by its advanced refrigerated technology.

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