2 Experts, 18 Questions, and 1 Clear Vision for The Future State of Logistics (Part 1)

‍Disruption and change, two topics that are at the forefront of most business conversations during the pandemic of 2020. True to our nature as a forward-thinking company, and with the help of our industry experts, Waldo Boshoff and Anton Richter, leaders of Viewmetrics, we’re exploring the future of logistics, specifically Industry 4.0 in South Africa.

Anton Richter

Waldo Boshoff

August 20, 2020

Disruption and change, two topics that are at the forefront of most business conversations during the pandemic of 2020. True to our nature as a forward-thinking company, and with the help of our industry experts, Waldo Boshoff and Anton Richter, leaders of Viewmetrics, we’re exploring the future of logistics, specifically Industry 4.0 in South Africa. For anyone who doesn’t know the team, you can read more about Waldo and Anton’s experience, backgrounds, and passions below.


Waldo Boshoff is the Founder and Managing Director of Viewmetrics. He started the company in 2014, which sprouted from the need for true disruption in the Transport and Distribution industries. Waldo is an Industrial Engineer by profession, Software Enthusiast by trade, and lives to solve complex problems.


Anton Richter, joined the company shortly after Waldo started it in 2014, currently functioning as the Senior Solutionist, and his focus is on growing the business as well as ensuring that, what Viewmetrics offers the marketing, is cutting edge, and that they are always driving efficiency, every step of the way.


1. What is Industry 4.0?


Industry 4.0 is kind of a buzz term that’s out there, and everyone’s got their own definitions. As a thought leader in the South African logistics industry, Waldo eloquently explains the term “Industry 4.0”.


Industry 4.0 is a broad term, it defines the revolution of “How Things Are Made” and “How Things Are Done”. For some it means, the Internet of things (IoT), for others it translates to manufacturing automation, which is still technically Industry 3.0, but Waldo defines it as:


“Using technology, to enable people to come as close to 100% efficient, safe, and purposeful operations as possible. The GIG economy, which consists of companies like Uber, Air BnB, Freelancer, all of whom are great examples of companies that have gotten the GIG economy side of things right, and that ties quite nicely into the Industry 4.0 mantra. A question that continually pops up in my mind and I would like to ask our readers is “What does the end state of industry 4.0 look like?” “If we had to play-out this scenario at the end of 4.0, does this mean that everything is automated, everything is run by AI?”


For the team at Viewmetrics, and in practical terms, it means; giving superpowers to your workforce who are currently running logistics.


2. What is something most people don’t understand about the Supply Chain and Logistics?


Supply Chain and Logistics, a foreign concept to most that are not in the industry themselves. According to Waldo, the biggest misconception is how many working parts there are to this entire machine. From a consumer’s perspective, their most relevant question is, “Why is it not better?” And one can understand that. They might ask “Why has my parcel not arrived yet?” “Why is the time window for delivery between 6 am - 6 pm on a specific day, that’s too big, why isn’t the distribution better?" In the B2B conversation, you might be asking, “Why is the vehicle utilisation so low?” or “Why is the driver overtime so high?” “Why are there so many safety incidents that we are not controlling and why are we not managing this correctly?”


Logistics is made up of exceptions, whereas in most other businesses, the exception is just that, the exception.


Let’s use an example from the banking industry. A failed payment when making a purchase online is an exception. A very small percentage of banking website users would experience this at some point in their customer journey. So the exception is mapped out and there is a lot of energy and resources made available to handle that, and it’s then defined as a new business process.


In logistics, exceptions are the norm. Changing the plan for the driver, or accommodating a last-minute order, for example, happens to the majority of your workforce, on any given day. If you are an end consumer and have received your parcel late, then chances are, your driver ran into an exception. Either him specifically or someone up the supply chain ran into an exception and the parcel is late.


As an engineer, the correct approach would be to sit down and map out each of those exceptions and assign the necessary resources to accommodate or manage those new processes. The biggest challenge is, those resources typically aren’t available. The individuals working in this space are typically the most overworked, so there is a real need to work smarter as opposed to working harder.


At the end of 2019, at the World Economic Forum in Cape Town, President Cyril Ramaphosa made the statement that 'This is Africa's century’. Which we know speaks directly to the continent's opportunities for growth. But before we dive into that, to know where you are going, you often have to look at where you’ve come from.


3. What have been the most notable leaps in the history of South African logistics over the past 10 years?


According to Anton, the South African logistics landscape is volatile at best. Even though we have seen a steady growth from 2010 to 2018, the rapid decline also ensued from 2019 to 2020 July. This volatility can be attributed to many factors, one definitely being the exchange rate that impacts things like the price of fuel, which in itself, is also a varying commodity.


Based on a study done by the CSIR, conducted in 2010 they listed that the Logistic Performance Index is a viable metric to measure a handful of attributes that contribute to a country's level of logistics performance. According to the latest results from the LPI, South Africa has steadily increased its performance until 2018. Apart from the Economic sphere, a monumental shift can be noted on the technological side too, buzz words like digitisation have been a make or break factor for many “old school” freight forwarders. We have seen that logistics optimisation is no longer a differentiator, and the market is full of companies offering technological solutions such as data mining, machine learning, and predictive maintenance for example. Anton is optimistic about what the future has in store for us, as a leader on the African continent.


To add to that, Waldo mentions that the most notable leaps over the past 10 years in South African logistics are related to technology that they themselves utilise. There has been a big uptake in Telematics and Video Tracking. If you rewind 10 years ago and take a sample of companies that actively manage their fleets on that level, very few would be checking off those tick boxes. In today’s environment, these advancements have become a “Permission to Play”, where one needs to have eyes on your vehicles and to know the driver and video utilisation, all of which enables one to do deep dives on your business’s data and understand and interrupt the second tier of metrics that are hidden in the data.


The Internet of Things (IoT), advanced robotics, automated technology, big data, and more innovations are clearly shaking up the supply chain industry every day. These trends, that come under the Industry 4.0 umbrella, can bring huge benefits to companies, but they are not without their disruptions and challenges to overcome.


As these trends and technologies continue to disrupt the industry and improve performance, changing customer expectations have forced everyone else in the sector to adapt. Keeping up with these trends is essential to survival and success, and getting ahead of the curve with the next effective disruptor could propel a supply chain to the very top.


4. Are there any other big trends that you’re watching right now in Supply Chain and Logistics?

Anton explains, there are many technological advancements looking to disrupt the industry as we know it, and for the team at Viewmetrics, they are enthusiastically watching the advancement of driverless technology. There are immense efficiency benefits that can be realised by automating fleet movement: better fuel efficiency, reduced maintenance costs, less incidents caused by slow human reaction or driver fatigue and a 24 hour, safe operation just to name some of the more obvious benefits.


5. What do you think is the next front of logistics? Does any particular area (e.g Africa) have untapped potential, and if so what are the challenges?


Viewmetrics has both worked to solve some of the bleeding edge international problems, as well as local or bleeding edge problems relevant to the African context. Together with a company based in Thailand, they co-designed a 3D routing system for drones running in Bangkok. Typical problems that arose were battery swop stations at each of their high rise buildings, the drones were limited in terms of the weight that could carry and for what distance. For this project that weight was 2 kg over 6km's, so if the delivery was longer than that, it was necessary to swop out the batteries at one or more of these various charging stations to enhance the range, rather than charging the batteries.


Those are a modern and first world focus for distribution problems. At Viewmetrics they focus on processes where they can have the greatest percentage improvement of efficiencies, and what they found in the case of drone deliveries, are that the improvements were marginal over conventional distribution methods, such as motorcycles. With this comparison, the total cost of ownership analysis (TCO) alluded to marginal improvement, whereas in the African context, you can achieve much more than a marginal improvement on a specific fleet, if you have a set of African curated best practices for logistics distribution.


The challenges Africa is facing in the supply chain sector are not always that different from those the rest of the world is facing:


• Increase in risks

• Globalisation and the impact of technology

• Pressure to keep costs down due to the growth in competition


However, the greatest logistics challenge consists in overcoming Africa’s deficient transport infrastructure, which has hindered the growth of several logistics markets because road and rail links between economic centers are uneven. Even though there is a network of roads they cannot be used as trade routes because some parts are yet to be built and other parts are deteriorated. This makes moving loads in Africa two to three times more costly than in developed countries.


In Waldo’s view, Africa has the largest potential for market place disruption given its technological ability. Unique challenges faced here can be, for example, standing in queues for a border post crossing for 2-3 days is not uncommon, so once again, having a quantitative approach, it can be difficult to plan for a 2-3 day border post-visit, but those are the challenges that we still need to take into account to optimise that operation.

Stay tuned...


In part 2 of this series, we explore how Viewmetrics is facing these challenges, we take a look at the logistics management company of tomorrow, and discuss if robots will ever replace humans in the supply chain.

If you want to know more about any of Viewmetrics solutions, head on over to www.viewmetrics.com home page, and if you enjoyed this article, let the team know by contacting us below. We’d love to hear from you.

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