Moving goods, transporting raw materials and generating wealth efficiently in a country as large as Brazil, where different transportation modes don’t always interconnect or are in good condition, is a real challenge for players who want to stay in the market. Logistics today can account for up to 35% of a company’s product costs. Taxation, variable from city to city and from state to state is also a factor that influences the logistics decisions for the road transportation of goods in Brazil. So ensuring end-to-end efficiency of the logistics process is essential for those who want to stand out from the competition.
Due to an increasingly challenging scenario, there is a constant search for tools and means to increase performance and improve final outcomes, including financial ones. And Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation are great allies in this search for efficiency. With the new technological resources available to them, players can not only define the best routes, the best modes, but also account for information from external sources when planning, such as weather, social factors (strikes and protests), fuel price hikes, among others.
If in the past, this type of technology was more restricted to large players, today with the increase in digitization, AI and smart automation can be reality for logistics companies of all types and sizes. Always considering the three basic elements for artificial intelligence solutions: business data, computing infrastructure and development of the algorithms themselves.
Data science can be used for various purposes in the field of logistics. By using AI to analyze sell-in (sales by the manufacturer to the distributor or retailer) and Sell-Out (next step in the sale, delivering the good to the end customer), both logistics companies and manufacturers can find points to optimize the supply chain, create prediction algorithms to avoid delays, losses and future breakdown in the supply chain and still be able to create recommendations for new strategies. Considering a pharmaceutical company, for example, monitoring only sales to distribution channels (drugstore chains) will give a limited view of problems and opportunities, but monitoring the sale to the end consumer will allow the player to anticipate and see the chain as a whole, predicting how much will be sold at the consumer end and at each stage. Once this information has been organized, management can understand and prepare for the entire process, from selling to the distributor to delivering the product to end consumers. By integrating this data and using it intelligently, companies can create business opportunities and foresee problems in the supply chain, among other factors that have a direct impact on business efficiency.
Agribusiness is another sector that can benefit greatly from new technologies. Shipping out harvests or receiving raw materials is very much dependent not only on road conditions, but also on other external factors. Some of the farms in Brazil can only be accessed by dirt roads. In addition to the time wasted due to the quality of these roads, product pick-up or delivery can take days or even weeks during heavy rains, which would compromise the harvest. By applying data science, we can account for different factors when planning the delivery route, such as the weather forecast, labor strikes, indigenous people’s protests. This makes it easier to make decisions involving rescheduling, new routes, new modes of transportation and even the time of departure and arrival of trucks on the farm. This is done to ensure the best cost efficiency and meeting the SLA (Service Level Agreement) of the delivery.
In logistics companies themselves, automation can be used for truck dispatch management, among other functions. By implementing a license plate scanning system, companies can identify the truck model and cargo type, periodically and automatically monitor traffic tickets issued across the country and supervise deliveries.
Technology has increasingly evolved as a tool to add value and ensure more efficient business management. AI and smart automation can increase productivity, improve storage processes, reduce failures, cut costs and, ultimately, increase customer satisfaction.
About Auctus – Augmented Intelligence
Auctus started as the innovation department of the Innovatech Group, and within few months it managed to generate a series of consulting services marked by heavy application of data science and artificial intelligence. Later, it became an independent company and consolidated its focus on Augmented Intelligence.
The business purpose of Auctus is to offer customized solutions capable of reducing costs and improving the experience of our clients’ customers through the application of data science and intelligent process automation, where we automate not only repetitive tasks, but also integration between systems, using unstructured data and generating insights and predictions for making business decisions.
The solutions of Auctus can be applied in small to large companies, in business processes that are common to all financial, administrative, customer service, human resources and IT companies, among others.