DHL has introduced its latest innovation in supply chain risk management that offers near real-time monitoring of shipment milestones across transport modes and external incidents capable of disrupting a business’ supply chain.
The Resilience360 mobile app, an extension of DHL’s Resilience360 platform, also provides businesses with access to supply chain information at any time or place and uses advanced technologies to help companies predict, assess and mitigate disruptions.
“In the increasingly connected world we live in, both people and goods are constantly on the move, making near real-time risk management imperative. At the same time, supply chains have become incredibly complex,” Tobias Larsson, head of Resilience360, DHL Customer Solutions & Innovations, said. “However, thanks to revolutionary technologies like big data, predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms, we are in a position to identify and manage risk like never before. The app puts all of that predictive power at your fingertips.”
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Speaking at the Fourth Annual DHL Risk and Resilience Conference this week, Google discussed how the logistics division of Alphabet Group, Google’s parent company, is using advanced incident management tools and real time shipment risk monitoring, powered by DHL Resilience360, to deliver its technical infrastructure and enable data center growth uses.
“The system allows us to take better ownership of exceptions,” Vivek Syania, head of Americas Transportation Ops in Google, said. “Instead of responding after a problem has occurred, we can now make decisions about shipments before they enter the pipeline or while they are in transit.”
In a case study report, the company explained how Resilience360 overlays Google’s transportation network and in-transit inventory over its platform, which is linked to data feeds from millions of external sources, collecting near real time information on situations and incidents that have the potential to affect transport operations. Those events include severe weather, road congestion or local industrial action and are filtered and prioritized using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This ensures that the command center in Google is notified promptly of the most relevant and actionable events, the study noted.
The platform also taps into Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies to provide precise information on the location of transportation assets such as ships, trucks and aircraft and even specific items such as cargo containers.
Since the platform went live with their command centers in the final quarter of 2017, the new platform has already demonstrated its value on numerous occasions, Google said. For instance, Syania said, “One of our major hubs located in the Southeast U.S. had a two-month period at the end of the year, impacted by three major disruptive events: a fire that shut down operations for two days, a major electrical failure and a storm. Each one of those incidents affected hundreds of our shipments, but we were able to take appropriate action in every case, contacting our internal customers and our carriers to make alternative arrangements that minimize the impact on our operations.”
Google said since it ships high-value and proprietary cargo in its supply chain that can be highly time-critical, the loss or delay of a single item has the potential to throw a project off schedule and risk exposing sensitive intellectual property. That’s why the company was looking for a comprehensive solution to identify supply chain risks before they impact Google’s in-transit supply chain.
Ilse Schultz, global transportation manager at Google, said, “By integrating multiple third-party data sources into a single platform, Resilience360 increases our operational efficiency and our ability to be proactive when exceptions happen. That’s helping our people manage the continual growth of the network while minimizing the additional costs caused by supply chain disruption.”
The Resilience360 mobile app is available in both the Google Play Store and the App Store.
