3PL Summit Day Three – The Afternoon

Martijn Graat from LogisticsMatter was live blogging and tweeting from the 3PL Summit & CSCO Forum in Antwerp. Here, we share with you his last blog post about the event.
 
I still owe you the post on the afternoon of the third day of the 3PL Summit, so here goes:
 
All good things come to an end, so the same goes for the 10th EyeforTransport European 3PL Summit. After lunch there were two sessions left, and it was a hard choice. One was the Supply Chain Director’s Dialogue (voted one of the top sessions at a recent EFT event) and the other a combination of two sessions “Direct Delivery as a Supply Chain Game Changer – Thriving in an “On-Demand” World” and a session on Shell’s new logistics management approach: 4PL. The third session was on Horizontal Collaboration, but I already heard a large part of that presentation on Day One. I chose Shell and the “On-Demand” World.
 
One might have expected the “On-Demand” Session to be about Direct Freight Deliveries, but the panel chose to discuss deliveries to consumer. A hot topic, as online sales are soaring, affecting retail supply chain operations the world over. Dirk Lannoo, Katoen Natie, started by posing that parcel deliveries are no longer about distance, more and more parcel carriers agree to country wide rates, making the costing model more transparent for online shops. He also pointed out that there are distribution models other than parcel delivery that are growing in demand, Kiala being one of them (With the Kiala system a parcel is delivered to a Kiala partner drop off point close to the consumer’s home, such as a gas station or a convenience store). According to Dirk the Kiala system also proves that speed and rush are no longer top of mind for consumers, as the consumers take an average of 3 days to pick up their parcel after receiving the notification that the parcel is ready for their pick up.
 
Ernst Hoekstra, Cycleon, pointed out that in Sweden the number of B2C deliveries exceeded the number of B2B deliveries for the first time this year. Not only are the number of B2C deliveries going up, the speed of transactions is also increasing, which requires better information being provided.
 
Andrew Austin, Priority Freight, acknowledged Dirk’s point about Kiala. They are seeing a change in the type of delivery address, such as drop boxes or offices.
 
In a future post I will go further into B2C deliveries.
 
In the following session Alastair Parker, Shell, talked about the new management approach at Shell: moving towards a 4PL type model. According to Alastair there is a phased approach when outsourcing logistics; however skillful the logistics partner, they do not fully understand the Shell business from the start, which is ok. 3PLs have a history of struggling as opposed to the pure 4PL, as the 3PL may be inclined to fill their own trucks first. Most important however is the relationship and behaviour of the people embedded in the Shell organization. Currently Shell uses 3-4 logistics partners. There are multiple reasons for this: there isn’t one single partner that can serve Shell effectively in every single country they are active in, another one is that different partners bring different things to the table. Key take away from the Shell presentation: The biggest role for Shell is to enable our logistics partner to be succesfull.
 
Final session of the day was a presentation on the 17th Annual 3PL Global Study. As there was nothing new presented I suggest you read the report (and all previous reports) here. One thing did jump out at me during this presentation:
 
Capgemini Consulting is one of the parties involved in the study and one of their consultants, Dennis Wereldsma, presented the results. There was one thing he said that I found mind boggling. When discussing the Supply Chain Innovation part of the study he completely dismissed Social Media, stating that it should have been left out of the study, because of being irrelevant for logistics service providers. I couldn’t agree LESS with him and will write a future post on this subject explaining why.
 
LogisticsMatter is an independent supply chain and logistics news aggregator. Top stories in the areas of 3PL, Logistics, Supply Chain, Transportation, Shipping, Sustainability and Social Media are tweeted through @LogisticsMatter, Press Releases are published on LogisticsMatter.com, and we blog about topics of interest. Please contact us at martijn@logisticsmatter.com if you want to publish a press release, contribute to our blog, or would like us to tweet and blog live from your event. 

Quelle: eyefortransport

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