Schlagwort-Archiv: Infrastructure

The looming end of independent logistics partners

Corona has made the public aware of the economy’s dependence on uninterrupted supply chains. In the current state of globalization, deliverables are coming from where they are cheapest. Manufacturing and distribution require complex supply routes – for raw materials, components, end products, and even services. As with all networks, the „last mile“ is the hardest part, often outsourced to external logistics partners, such as DHL, Hermes, UPS, DPD, GLS, FedEx/TNT, and, if necessary, small biz. B2C, in particular, depends on the delivery networks, literally every household.

In 2020, each home in Germany received an average of 63 shipments. It means more than one delivery per week. Every shipment must be taken manually by a logistics partner on the „last meters“ and carried more or less far. The delivery companies work with their hubs from where they drive with their vehicles within the day to the addressees. Increasingly, drivers are skipping time-consuming stations. Can it go on like this?

  • Too many
    The distribution of shipments among several logistics partners is inconvenient for the shippers and the recipients. Each company has its approach to steer drivers, vehicles, procedures, and delivery points in the best possible way. As a result, many vehicles deliver to one customer per day. Each driver has its way of leaving packages and documenting acceptance – drivers are not afraid to sign on behalf of the customer or fill their systems with false status messages. Digitization indeed creates timely transparency. Still, misuse by drivers destroys this advantage (example message: Unfortunately, acceptance of your parcel has been refused. Therefore, your package will be returned to the sender.).
  • Automated non-contact
    The quickest way to resolve a problem is for the addressees to contact the deliverer quickly. The assumption that recipients could contact the deliverer with just one click is one of the urban legends of the Internet age. Although providers offer online forms and a well-hidden telephone number to enable contact. All the customer gets is a well-worded standard message sent immediately to confirm receipt. However, it is automated feedback without any human participation. The spam folder in which the requests disappear cannot be traced. A phone call does not help either. Modern telephone systems provide lengthy verbal menus that need to be answered, only to end up waiting on hold until an employee picks and immediately hangs up. The whole thing now starts all over again. Remarkable is in this context DPD, who announces the upcoming waiting times every few minutes – 5 minutes in the beginning, then 14 minutes, then 1 minute, then 11 minutes, and so on. The end of the story is that the installed touchpoints are no longer contact points, but walls keep the customer away.
  • Inappropriate infrastructure
    Undoubtedly, it is an advantage for the consumer society that people can order goods conveniently, from their sofa, and receive them in principle at the front door. ONE logistics partner would be much more sustainable – fewer appointments, less congestion, fewer differences, and more reliable delivery. As long as the recipients live in the countryside and have sufficient parking spaces in front of the house, stopping should not be critical – as long as it is delivered at all to the last, uneconomic corner. The risks and walking distances increase dramatically in inner cities since drivers are now consistently penalized for stopping in bike lanes or second row parking. It is even worse in traffic-congested centers. Since drivers have to distribute a lot of parcels in a very short time to get to their hourly wage, it can quickly happen that drivers simply do not deliver to complicated addresses because their standard run is jeopardized. Drivers‘ inhibitions are already so low that in complex cases, they decide not to deliver – „I don’t have time to deliver there.“
  • Precarious employment
    Delivery companies have few alternatives to spare money – first with salaries and then with vehicles. Permanent employees with a reasonable minimum wage are the most expensive way to provide a delivery network. Salaries range from up to 22% more than average, to even 10% less than the average (which explains why some parcels do not arrive reliably). The most favorable alternative for the parcel, express, and courier services is self-employed small biz owners. Here, the delivery companies benefit from the self-exploitation of the individual entrepreneurs. As a result, the black sheep drivers destroy the reputation of the delivery company at the touchpoint to the customer. With the current remuneration, it is understandable that the drivers take advantage of existing gaps. The dispatched companies support these relationships by placing orders with the cheapest suppliers.

Bottom line: The brave new world of online commerce thrives on the glamour of websites. Easy navigation and ALWAYS the best prices encourage customers to buy. However, the backbone of it all is not the online presentation but the reliable supply chain. With multiple disparate service providers, sealing-off through automated touchpoints, difficult delivery infrastructure, and precarious workforce, this biz model is at risk. The pendulum of online commerce eventually reaches its maximum amplitude. When the pendulum swings back, the local shops will win back customers for lucrative goods. In the meantime, the big companies will follow Amazon’s lead and establish their internal delivery management, making drivers a committed part of the biz. Companies like DPD will disappear in the medium term. The black sheep make the most significant contribution to the impending end of independent logistics partners of drivers who optimize themselves and do not act in the interests of their company.

Creating controllability step by step

A utopia of total control was described again and again in books and movies. Think about 1984 by George Orwell, where Big Brother has control of the most private spheres of life. Or remember Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, in which the possession or reading of books is legally forbidden and where the pervasiveness of the mass media in private life is well illustrated. These conceptions of the future that are shown in many science fiction stories provide an unattractive end state that was surely not developed at one go, but gradually. The required bases for such scenarios do not evolve from one day to the other. The whole begins completely innocently, by creating the controllability step by step.

Ueberwachung

The utopias provide only scrappy ideas, if at all, how these controls are created. The following steps show a possible scenario.

  1. Develop appealing offerings
    Everything starts with the technical feasibility. New products and services provide attractive solutions that are becoming by and by affordable for most of the consumers. With the television the unidirectional connection of spectators began. Broadcasts were sent from one sender to many receivers. With the Internet we have the bi-directional connection between many senders and many receivers. In this case there is also data transmitted that does not serve the actual purpose (e.g. duration, frequency and the interests of the users). On this basis further applications are possible, like the navigation system, cashless payment or the electronic passport. These applications transfer more and more confidential data.
    The users are thereby bound into the future control system, without being aware, how much they reveal about themselves.
  2. Free use through advertisement and handing over data
    For high prevalence more and more free or at least cheap offers are made that are “paid” with the supply of data. The users cannot determine, which data is getting exchanged with the data release or the regular update of the app.
    For data fisher men, like the global secret services, it is a smart approach to develop an attractive software that supplies them directly with the appropriate information.
  3. Creating laws and regulations
    This procedure becomes legal by explicitly confirming the terms and conditions of an app by the users – without this confirmation one would not get the software. One suggests security to the citizens by limiting the duration of the data storing and, for example, the necessity for a judicial decision for using the data. This is raising the question, which spies would have ever been made responsible for their illegal bugging and monitoring actions. This makes the juridical question questionable.
    The apparent rule of law is pure sham, as long as national borders and the nearly impossible control of their activities as well as the national self-interests provide the operators sufficient free space.
  4. Facilitating exhaustive tracking
    We weave today inadvertently a close meshed net of our behavior with the introduction of mobile offers, like the mobile phones, computers, navigation systems, location-dependent services and applications for detecting vehicles and packages as well as our individual browsing behavior. And everything can be found in the data storages of the Cloud. Calling a competitor of your employer by phone and the download of internal documents and the trip to this enterprise permit already nowadays unpleasant conclusions.
    The infrastructure is already there. As soon as unscrupulous persons receive the access, we are in a still more terrible 1984.
  5. Abolish alternative offers
    In order to guarantee all this it is helpful that alternative behaviors are no longer available. With the conversion of payphones from coins to calling cards it is any more possible to phone, without storing the connection details. The abolishment of cash, as it is getting real in Scandinavia, makes it impossible to pay, without having the payment documented. The electronic passport guarantees that all border crossings can be evaluated.
    As soon as those aspects of our everyday life are virtualized, everything is in the hand of those, who have control of this system.

This is nota re-narration of 1984, but a list of steps that lead to a pervasive monitor. With a close look, we will recognize that we let these steps already behind us in those regions of the world, where constant supply of electricity and information already exists. Occasional attempts to use these channels with appropriate filters for censorship leak out. This is not a classical end time scenario of conspiracy theoreticians, but our current reality. With the divulgence of governmental secrets by Snowdon, we had to learn that our fantasy is not big enough, in order to be able to imagine the current practices.

Bottom line: We already overhauled the utopia of George Orwell with today’s technical possibilities. The controllability of all people is technically possible today. If the scruples of those, who have the control, continue to disappear or control is taking over by a strong power, we will be in the position of Winston Smith – only with drastically expanded consequences.