Optimise your supply chain with the help of digitalisation and enable transparent and efficient transport management. Andreas Fida, Director of High-Tech Logistics at cargo-partner GmbH, talks about how this is done in an interview.
- Mr Fida, tell us about cargo-partner.
Happily! We are a privately run full-service info-logistics provider with a broad portfolio of air, sea, land transport and logistics services. Information technology and supply chain optimisation are our particular strengths. We operate over 130 locations in 40 countries to provide fast and efficient solutions to a wide range of industries worldwide. With the SPOT platform, we offer simple cooperation and full transparency along the entire supply chain.
- Which digitalisation topics are particularly important to you?
It is important to us to provide our customers with tools and systems that facilitate collaboration with all stakeholders in the global supply chain. In doing so, we pursue the goal of creating transparency and enabling efficient transport management.
To this end, we introduced the SPOT supply chain management platform in 2000. Initially, a simple tracking tool, SPOT is now a comprehensive visibility and collaboration platform with a variety of modules and functions to optimise every aspect of the supply chain. This starts with the ordering process and continues through transport management, warehouse management and parcel shipping to shipment tracking and detailed reports.
Today and in the future, we will increasingly focus on a fully integrated, end-to-end customer experience along the transport process: from the planning of a transport to the execution to the analysis and optimisation of transport processes and data.
- What are the special challenges of your industry at the moment and how are you working on them?
The current challenges are the dynamic environment driven by the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated high volatility in a global supply chain. We work in very close communication between our teams and departments, using all the IT tools at our disposal to respond in the best possible way to the constantly changing conditions. At the same time, we want to continue to drive innovation in our company. We are taking advantage of the e-commerce boom to continuously develop our parcel and e-fulfilment solutions – from the parcel module of our SPOT platform to direct links between our warehouses and our customers’ webshops.
- How do you expect your membership in the eco Association to support you in this?
As a full-service info-logistics provider with a high affinity for IT, we want to identify all technological trends at an early stage in order to make the right decisions in the digitalisation process. On the other hand, cargo-partner would also like to understand the complex logistics requirements of its customers in the High Tech & Electronics sector even better in order to develop suitable logistics products from them.
- What opportunities does digitalisation offer us in the future?
A major future topic in digitalisation is data-driven predictability in the supply chain (predictive/prescriptive analytics). Customers not only want to see where their goods are in real time, but in the event of an unexpected event or disruption in the supply chain, they want to be proactively informed about what is happening to their goods, what solution options are available (prescriptive analytics) and what the possible effects on costs, delivery times, etc. are (predictive analytics). We are constantly working to improve the quality of data and processes in our company in order to offer our customers and partners the best possible planning capability for their supply chain.
Andreas Fida is an authorised signatory and Director of High-Tech Logistics at cargo-partner GmbH. He studied Logistics & Supply Chain Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration and has held various management positions as an expert in high-tech logistics throughout his professional life.
