By Esteban Vargas – Dinet Operations Manager
Someone once said: “Innovation configures our way of looking into the future, of taking risks, impacting and transcending in the local and global market”.
In Peru there is innovation and it has evolved very much in ten years but we have to evaluate and compare progress by looking at how it has happened in the world, to be able to understand what there is innovation in, which countries innovate the most and what companies do it. To understand this I worked with a publication by Strategy + Business and Forbes business magazine. In the mentioned list, there are many companies that we hear of, that we read of or in which we are users.
These publications are really recent (2016-2017) but independently from who is first right now, the most important thing is to know in what there is more investment and who has the world’s best performance in innovation.
According to the magazines, most investments are done in Software and Internet, Computer and Electronics, Healthcare, Automobiles, Aerospace and Defense, among others, and the most remarkable companies are Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, Tesla, Toyota, IBM, Merk, Roche and Microsoft, among others that are not less important. Many of these companies are European, American and Middle Eastern.
Is there innovation in our country? To answer this question I had to investigate a lot of published information and also look at my experience of more than 25 years in international and national companies’ supply chains. I also thought it was interesting to complement this information with a UPC (Peruvian University of Applied Sciences) publication regarding an “Entrepreneurial Creativity” contest that summarizes 20 years of innovation in Peru, and that collects the recent history of innovation in our country in different categories and industries.
While reviewing in detail the publication, I understood that there are many industries, areas or opportunities that have been sustainably remarkable in the last two decades. There are innovation success stories that have focused in solving daily problems in Peru, in facilitating user operations, in boosting industries such as tourism and gastronomy, but there is almost nothing regarding success stories presented by the big Peruvian 3PL’s regarding supply chain improvement and I asked myself why.
I think this is due to the problems that exist in the logistics services industry, such as road infrastructure, port congestion, informality in transportation, among others, because software and internet solutions, as well as computer and electronic solutions are available in any of the country’s 3PL, to the point that in the last 10 years, many logistics operators have invested in world class software, warehouse management, transportation, order planning, e-commerce, and many other fields.
So, where are innovation opportunities for the 3PLs? To answer this question first of all we need to understand that problems faced by the logistics sector in the country don’t affect at all or affect very little and secondly, we must also understand what innovation is and for this I would like to explain in a nutshell what are the different types of innovation.
Why am I explaining this? Because although the 3PL have invested in software to improve logistics services to generate greater added value, I believe that innovation is related with differentiated logistics processes that seek to improve costs and service, that are modeled with different software that are integrated with each other, in a service that the client expects. On the other hand, clients expect to integrate operators’ processes and software.
This means that innovation in 3PL is oriented towards incremental or improvement innovations, that seek optimization and cost reduction. However this will only add value, and only if, the clients allow logistic operators to enter and understand their internal processes. And also if operators develop and implement service standards that help optimizing and improving costs. For example, in the retail industry there are many opportunities to improve freight cost by doing night replenishment, certified deliveries that are consolidated per section and technologically identified with barcodes or RFID to make transactions easier between the client and the logistics partner.
Clients and 3PL must permanently seek to improve costs throughout the chain and have traceability and visibility of the delivered and received service. Thus, logistics trends experienced by the Peruvian market are related to facilitating online information for clients regarding service, thanks to computer and electronic progress. These are the logistics operator’s tools to provide services.
For 2018, DINET’s goal is to finish integrating its logistics systems, internally as well as with its providers. After this, the goal is to finish the visibility and traceability portal for clients in the retail, mass consumption, durable goods, cosmetics and mining industries.
