Continuing with traffic congestion issue, Uber has another futuristic but more realistic solution, electric flying cars.
It is true that so many changes must be done in order to adapt actual conditions to this advancement, but this type of vehicle already exists.
The advances that are taking place yearly are amazing. I can not even imagine how our lives can be in 20 years, but this kind of changes are feasable solutions to daily problems that can improve a lot our daily lives.
Three years ago, when I lived in Paris, I used to confront traffic congestion. It was horrible!!! Distances that usually took 10′ to pass, became hours at peak times, usually when I came back from work. I have awful memories about how much time I used to spend in my car, listenning podcasts to learn french.
Therefore, after my terrible experience, when I read ideas like this I feel so hopeful about how we could improve traffic circulation in congested cities.
A firm called “Boring Company” is studying a project to solve this situations. The solution is about building multiple tunnels underground, accessible by a lift system. Each tunnel would have a railway which will transport each vehicle to a suitable point at a maximum speed of 200 km/h.
It is much more comprehensible when explained through images; therefore, the next video shows a simulation about how it could work.
Honestly, I wish we could use this kind of systems to avoid traffic congestions, that could help a lot of people to spend more time with family, friends and to balance work with social life.
It is said that Oceans are the world’s dump. According to National Geographic, “there are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean. Of that mass, 269,000 tons float on the surface, while some four billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer litter the deep sea”.
Next infography shows top 10 items foun in our oceans caused by human being.
The only way to solve completely this problem is by making people concern about the issue and creating a responsible feeling to them through education. This will take time and it coud be achieved in some generations, but for the moment some of the people already concerned is focusing on the trash process from a logistical point of view.
Since most of the trash comes from rivers, one of the solutions found by John Kellet, was focusing on processing the trash of the rivers before it achieves the ocean. I kindly introduce you to Mr. trash wheel, a sustainable solar and water-powered trash cleaner:
It takes the trash from rivers, process it and then burns it to transform it in energy, providing energy for more than 6000 households in Meryland in 2016.
Next picture shows the impact in the Baltimore harbor:
The photo on the left was taken on April 30, 2014, after a torrential downpour washed a harrowing amount of garbage into the harbor. Just over a year later, a similar storm earlier had almost no recognizable impact on the Harbor.
We must improve our habits in order to avoid this issue, but there are some advances made in order to diminish the impact of trash in the oceans. This is just an example made thanks to focusing from a logistics point of view in the process of trash contamination.
I would like to introduce what most of you know but it worries me a bit: Population growth.
In the next figure, we will see population growth forecast until 2100. Since we are already 7 billion people, with limited resources and with a lot of demand, this means that we must make a lot of advances to reach a sustainable world.
Having a quick overview on the figure, we can see that most of the growth is forcasted to be in undeveloped countries, provided with less infrastructure. Moreover, from a globalized perspective, we are on our way to a more connected world, with more specialized countries where all of us export and import products from everywhere. For example, in Spain we receive daily a huge variety of products from China, wood from Finland or Marble from Brazil, on the other hand we send cars to Austria, furniture to France and vegetables to Germany. But what does this last assumption imply in a more connected world, with a growing population and therefore a growing demand?
Let’s remember what is logistic to understand clearly how important is becoming:
As we see in the picture, logistics it is not just about equipments, goods or material, but also time, energy and information. If it is difficult nowadays with the resources and technology we are provided with, How difficult can it become? Are we ready to face this situation? What do we need to advance in order to overcome it?
Logistics has always been a key point in human development, but we have never faced an exponential growth as this one, will we be capable to sustainably overcome this situation? We are facing a huge challenge that will determine the future of human being and logistics (and other aspects/disciplines too) will play a central role on it.
Before having to work on this topic for Logistics class I knew about bar codes but when I started to read on this topic I started to understand how important for business world is GS1 and how they help each of us day by day.
GS1 is an international non profit organization that provides these supply chain standards for industry (Retailers, Health, transport, logistic, etc.). It serve to identify, capture and share information between different stakeholders. In the next video you will see how GS1 has helped us during the years and the impact it has had on business.
One way to understand crearly how it works is by watching the next video, that shows with examples how it works.
Curiously this week, I have had my first professional experience with this topic. Usually we are used to see how the logistics of Amazon work to deliver products to customers fastly, but what are the options from different points of view?
From sellers perspective, you can do it by your own or contract the fullfilment by Amazon service. This is what is the fullfilment by Amazon.
To contract the fullfilment by Amazon service there is some requirements, how it works?
Among all the requeriments to use this service, one of the main is having an EAN code that gives the information about each product to be processed and shared with the Amazon logistics team to properly communicate with the final consumer.
The image above shows an EAN code needed to work with amazon and gives the information about the origin of the product, manufacturer information, product details and serial number.
As I said before, I was not aware about the importance of GS1 until these days, when I clairly saw the importance of this way to communicate with the different stakeholders by using standar forms that really help and ease the business trade.
Since 19th century, an elevator as a transport to the space has been a dream, something unrealistic, according to Elon Musk (click on the name to check the video). Well probably it was some years ago, but thanks to nanotechnology advances it has become already a project.
A project hold by a japanese company named Obayashi corporation, who plans to start the construction in 2025, wants to create an elevator from earth to the moon. It will allow transporting cargo and humans into space, being able to save up to 90% of space transport costs of payloads. It consists in a 96.000 km long nanotube cable. Just the cable could take 20 years to build.
Next video shows virtually how it would be and gives some interesting information (some already mentioned) about the project and the material needed.
Nowadays it is just a project, a lot of sceptics argue against the viability of the project, others trust on the team behind it. But avoiding this information, Can you imagine how this project could change the spacial logistics forever? It could avoid the use of rockets, it could hugely reduce transportation costs, it could help us to reach easier spacial research, and so on.
Is it feasible? What do you think? Leave a comment below and let me know your opinion.
Milar is a spanish appliances wholesale “cooperative”. They sell a lot of different brands in more than 400 stores.
Each Milar store is privately owned by different owners, but they work logistically together under the same brand.
These 400 stores are splited in the whole national territory, and this territory is divided per regions. In each region exists a central warehouse where products are stocked and ready to be soldin stores.
Therefore, there are different levels of logistics in this company that make him pretty interesting to analyze it quickly.
Since they sell a lot of different brand,they work with a lot of suppliers that are mainly connected with the wharehouse and Milar’s central purchase department. This department forecasts the quantity demanded according to seasonality and trends, in order to be accurate and provide a huge availability of products to their retailers.
Let’s see in the next picture how its distribution network works:
These are the different steps of the logistic process:
Step 1
Manufacturers of different appliances and different brads, send the products to Milar warehouses after order.
Step 2
Products are stocked in regional warehouse. Milar has several warehouses strategically located to serve all the stores regionally.
Step 3
Stores of the region makes orders to the warehouse. Stores carry the transport from warehouse to the store.
Step 4
Customer buys in the store or online. If online, they can A receive the products at home (pay the transport) or B at the store (free transport).
So this is how Milar’s distribution network and how a big company operates logistically. But what’s the secret connected to all these different elements interacting in the process? They have a taylor-made inventory software that let’s the information flow between warehouse, retailers and online customers.
Sources:
Interviews to different Milar retailers.
Robots started to have impact in businesses several years ago. However, logistics was not affected by robots because of the complexity of the work (handling a lot of thing in many possible combinations, close to people and in small spaces).
Let’s see some data that explains the actual situation of warehouses:
However of this data, robotics research has been evolving so fast:
Nowadays, robots have started to make their impact in logistics thanks to the combination of different research fields advances: Electrical engineering, computer science, mathematics, law, cognitive schiences, psychology, biology and mechanical engineering.
For example the case of Amazon robots, called good-picker robots, used in Amazon’s warehouses to move mercancy inside the plant.
Due to their performance in recent years, Amazon is using more than 45.000 robots in their worldwide warehouses, and it seems that this amount will keep increasing, replacing humans by more advanced robots. In fact, they are testing drone transport, in order to innovate in transportation and get a pioneer position in the market. Next video shows its first trial.
Amazon is one of the most known examples of robotics users, but let’s see what DHL expects next years to happen. DHL expects great changes in their distribution centers for next years. Next picture shows just what a DHL distribution center can be in near future.
According to DHL, new operations will incorporate different types of robot each with a specific job to perform such as unloading trucks, co-packing, picking orders, checking inventory, or shipping goods. Most of these robots will be mobile and self-contained but they will be coordinated through advanced warehouse management systems and equipped with planning software to track inventory movements and progress orders with a high degree of accuracy. As we see in the picture, experts see a distribution center fully robotic.
As we can see, interest in the field of robotics is clearly increasing, and more and more, robotics are having an impact in logistics fields. More funding is pouring into development than ever before from governments, large companies, and venture capitalists. Low-cost sensors and faster computers have made previously impossible challenges more manageable. Everything looks like the turning point of a new era has been already passed. Business is changing due to this innovation and logistics is evolving seriously in last years due to e-commerce trends.
Probably our focus should be on checking how we can take profit of robots in order to differentiate from the others. Amazon has already moved to this technology and large companies as DHL is on its way too, so better let’s see how this can affect us individually and let’s position ourselves in the new era which is about to come.
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-robot-army-has-grown-by-50-2017-1
www.forbes.com/…/robots-in-the-warehouse-its-not-just-amazon/
“Robotics in logistics” by Tom Bonkenburg.
We have always been said that logistics can be a source of competitive advantage.
Looking at Amazon it seems like only those monster companies can achieve this competitive advantage by size and capabilities. But logistics can help not just the big ones but small ones too.
Here, we are about to see a case model of how a small company can extremely optimize its logistics and get unbelievable profits!
A Spanish company from Almeria, named Calconut. They are global nuts traders. In 2012 its total income was 8 million euros, and just in 3 year, they committed to multiply that quantity by 15, achieving a total income of 126 million of euros. Let’s see a bit more about Colcanut.
Having a look on the video we arrive to the key of the calconut’s success, an innovative logistic management.
As one of the main slogans of the company, “Our warehouse is the Ocean, nuts in time”, its strategy has been focused on delivering their products as fast as possible by optimizing its logistic process, based on maritime transport. They use the fastest and cheapest maritime ways, and are able to change containers from one ship to another fastly, “without unloading the container”, as they say.
Just in a few years, thanks to its efforts on improving their logistics and achieving this competitive advantage in the market, income growth has reached them to top 20 nut’s trader. To have an idea of what this means, just by improving its sales thanks to its logistics innovations, nowadays they are ranked as the number 11 biggest nut importer country in the world, just being a company.
This is just one successful story, but it is crowded of them in the business world. I just tried to share this information in order to highlight one thing, Logistics can improve a companies performance hugely, so let’s take it seriously.
References:
The blog of Logistics at MGEPS at UPV 