Why increasing the quality and availability of data is the best thing we can do for long term supply-chain resilience By TRISTAN ANDERSON – Leader, Logistics and Infrastructure Policy Infrastructure, Investment & Economics – GHD Advisory Figure 1 Benefits of Data Sharing
COVID-19 has generated unprecedented disruption in the global logistics and freight industries, severely impacting operations and delivery activities. However, could these current challenges ultimately pave the way for a more streamlined, efficient and resilient future? Maybe, but without data who would know? There are a plethora of thought leadership pieces and articles on ‘resilient supplychains’, industry commentator’s telling supply-chain practitioners to ‘source more products from different places’ as if this is the panacea for a resilient supply-chain. Many are taking short term events and extrapolating them out to soothsay long term trends. Ambulance chasing and shorttermism is a damaging distraction and no doubt unhelpful for those ‘in the trenches’ of our critical supply-chains, as if an exporter had never considered the diversification benefits of exporting to multiple markets. Supply-chain practitioners, freight forwarders, logistics managers, transport dispatchers and network operators are the best placed to identify weakness in supplychains, they are best placed to identify remedies that will increase supply-chain resilience. As consultants the best we can do is arm clients with the tools to enable this expert supply-chain knowledge to be leveraged to maximum effect. Network optimisation, and dynamic simulation tools exist and they are powerful, able to identify bottlenecks, optimise routes and run response simulations based on disruption scenarios. But all these tools are worthless without high quality data, and this data needs to be sourced from well beyond your own organisation. Supplychain resilience is about assessing how your supply-chain performs given changes in your external environment, but you’ll be surprised how few companies actually model external factors. Largely this is due to complexity, and
the lack of high quality freight movement, network capacity and productivity data. Our international competitiveness depends on us getting this right but too often our insular thinking prevents us from sharing data. “They say when two nations trade both economies are better off, it is the same with data.” Governments have an important role to play as a trusted facilitator and data custodian however industry has to proactively support and participate. Current initiatives such as the Port of Melbourne Container Logistics Chain
Study and the National Freight Data Hub are admirable undertakings but they need industry support. Both projects will make datasets available to inform better investment decisions, scenario modelling and other productivity enhancing initiatives. If your freight is not included in these datasets then it may not be considered in these important undertakings and investment decisions. With modern data capture not only industry will be relied on for accumulating data, the use of mobile network data and optical recognition software have proven to be valuable tools for capture however industry contributions will always be required to ensure integrity and completeness. Winter 2020 I Across Borders I 49