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Collaborative logistics should take full advantage of SMS messaging | BulkSMS.com

July 21, 2008

Dr Pieter Streicher, managing director of BulkSMS.com, a Cape Town based messaging service provider, considers how SMS messaging is facilitating collaboration within the logistics supply chain.

Today, advances in the Internet and SMS messaging offer logistics industry players a competitive strategy to continue adding value to customers. The move toward the use of Web-based and mobile technologies for business collaboration within the supply chain is enabling logistics providers to meet the growing challenges of globalisation and the need to reduce carbon emissions while still meeting customer expectations for the shipping or delivery of orders.

Logistics management is primarily an information business. Information on raw material supply forecasts drives the process flow of products. Information about truck delivery schedules allows assets to be shared to reduce the expense and carbon emissions associated with haulage from distribution centres to retailers. The real-time modification and synchronisation of information makes up the manifests, waybills and other documentation required to ship goods. The efficient management of these information flows therefore becomes part of a logistics operation’s drive to enhance profitability and working capital.

The benefits of the Internet is that is allows a company to share and manage information more easily and cheaply with firms in another city or country by providing connectivity between logistic management systems. Many third party logistics providers (3PLs) are enabling supply chain efficiencies and shared processes between firms by adopting Web-based software as a service model.

Taking the collaborative model further and maximising the use of mobile technologies, SMS messaging allows a company to instantaneously communicate real-time information at a relatively low cost with targeted parties outside of the computer networks. Today, cellphones are the preferred communications channel because they are bound to always be on a person or nearer than a computer. This is a key driver for adopting SMS messaging.

SMS messaging can be used for logistics management in several ways:

• Customers can track an order during shipping and be informed of it current status via automated messages from a logistics management system.
• Customers can receive an automated message notifying them of the delivery of an order.
• Notifying drivers of a change in delivery schedules whilst on the road.
• Placing an order with suppliers.
• Scheduling reminders to staff about core tasks or supplier appointments.
• Truck owners are able to broadcast the fact that have unused capacity for haulage.

The use of SMS messaging for prompted or automated communications within the supply chain goes far in removing the barriers to collaborative logistics among industry players. Implemented alongside Web-based software services, SMS communications help in lowering the hidden costs of logistics management for firms and provide high levels of certainty to all parties within the supply chain.