Packages delivered to the glaringly wrong addresses, missing items from doorstep shopping services, restaurants and supermarkets running out of staple food products, empty fuel supplies, water shortages, no baby-food, late car-parts … all of these and countless other logistics failures happen somewhere in the world every single day.
Very often, customers only learn about these failures when it is too late to source replacements. In the age of sophisticated digital data manipulation and artificial intelligence, how is this even possible?
Naturally, some mislaid items are plainly more important than others. A missing box of Shreddies breakfast cereals from a home-delivery Ocado shopping list (mine was curated only 17 hours or so before the failed delivery was revealed) does not even come close to bearing comparison with a delayed life-sciences airfreight shipment and other sensitive, vital medical products such as anti-cancer treatments.
These failures still miss the target though – and other people out of the logistics intelligence loop, such as hard-working ground handlers for example, are usually left to face the music.
I note from the LinkedIn business social media platform that, surprisingly, Ocado has its own ‘head of logistics excellence’. I wonder if any such professionals who specialise in logistics (earn a living from, study, chronicle, challenge it) spend a disproportionate amount of their time explaining to dissatisfied customers what keeps going wrong. Do they even care? And what do they mean by the word: ‘excellence’?
I remember when, as a raw air cargo journalist, I travelled from the UK to Japan to meet and interview some important airfreight customers of the then fledgling British airline Virgin Atlantic. I was particularly impressed by what, at the time, seemed to be a revolutionary attitude from car-making customer Toyota towards logistics (a word that barely existed in those days). I was taken to Toyota City, a manufacturing/living/social environment where everything depended on timely performance. They had a name for this forward-thinking concept. It was called just-in-time and it encompassed a zero-defect approach. That was some 40 years ago.
Not early, not late, not missing, not waiting, on-time, in-time, reliable. And the Japanese did not have any technological assistance.
Elsewhere in the world – and a few decades on – and Ocado Group which, ironically, is described as a technology-led global software and robotics platform, still cannot reliably deliver a box of Shreddies to a regular customer. Are airlines and forwarders – and their digitalisation ‘pals’ – equally guilty of the same failures?
What is it about these internal and external logistics cultures and their failing technological interventions that allows too many customers to be let down?
I think I know the answer.
It has nothing to do with the technology. It’s the incompetence of the humans that manage it.
