Logistics 2023: Three important trends for the transport industry

What will logistics look like in 2023? Lasse Landt provides the answers. He is Managing Director and CFO of Pamyra GmbH, a comparison portal for freight forwarding services. It allows users to compare the prices and services of reliable freight forwarders and other transport companies for private and commercial customers. Pamyra's network includes freight forwarders in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and throughout Europe.

Three main trends for logistics in 2023 can now be derived from the comparative values and usage data. Accordingly, Lasse Landt considers topics such as the modernization of IT, the setting of sustainable climate targets, and the use of automation and AI in logistics to be essential.

1. Necessity of IT modernization
   One thing is certain, the transport industry is still under pressure to make strong progress with digitization in the coming year. While digitization is more than IT modernization, it is ultimately a big part of it. The goal of logistics companies must be to be able to intelligently combine different technologies in order to connect with business partners and customers and continue to grow. The fact that the IT in many companies is very outdated means that collaboration is often very complicated. In the future, it will be important for industry players to further develop common communication standards to ensure interoperability. This works much better in other areas where digitization or modernization is already further advanced. Here, RESTful APIs show that communication between different software can work well with good documentation. A good example of this is the start-up and our partner Magaloop. The ordering app digitizes ordering processes of kiosks and retailers and connects them with suppliers and manufacturers. The tool ensures fast, simple and efficient ordering processes and thus helps an entire industry to better manage its resources.
2. Advancing sustainable goals and climate neutrality
   The importance of promoting sustainability has not passed the logistics industry by. Setting their own goals here and improving their ecological footprint is a major hurdle that many companies in the industry have to overcome. Logistical processes must be converted to be resource-friendly and CO₂-neutral - quite a mammoth task. At present, there are still too few ways to meaningfully determine CO₂ consumption, for example. However, as digitization progresses, there will also be solutions here to make logistics greener. At present, we feel that the willingness to pay here is unfortunately still lower than media reporting would suggest. On the other hand, due to the complexity and fragmentation of the transport market, we often simply lack the means to assign an exact CO₂ footprint to a package. But we are working on finding a solution that will enable freight forwarders to offset their CO₂ emissions through our platform.
3. Automation and AI as problem solvers
   New and innovative problem-solving approaches are more important than ever in the logistics industry in order to survive in the long term. In this context, automation and artificial intelligence can contribute to mastering numerous challenges in logistics and, above all, to increasing efficiency and resilience. The topic has been set as a trend for many years, but in 2023 a large number of processes will certainly continue to be automated with it. We, too, are already working internally on an AI-driven document capture capability. The goal is for our customers to enter documents and then have them automatically recognized and processed using AI. In the future, more and more logistics companies will work with the help of artificial intelligence and automation. This will then take over many tasks, such as planning routes or avoiding empty runs.

Source: Pamyra GmbH