Regardless of the geographies in which a retailer operates, peaks in demand are an inevitable yet very welcome fact of life in operations. Where once retailers spent many days in the run-up to a big sale event or promotion readying their physical retail outlets, today most stores also have to make ready their online retail operations: the virtual storefront, warehouses, distribution network, payment platforms, online marketing activities and a dozen more elements besides.

Whether it’s Singles’ Day, Cyber Monday, Christmas, or Eid al-Fitr, surges in demand for retail stores, both online and offline, contribute significantly to many businesses’ revenues. The ability to preserve excellent customer service and fulfil every order seamlessly depends on many of those moving parts functioning as themselves, but more critically, as cogs in the machinery of a larger retail machine.

At the consumer’s end, a late delivery or two may go largely unnoticed, but failing systems that underpin the retail experience at a significant scale can unleash a deluge of bad press that is difficult to recover from. Attempts to repair the damage after the fact and extraordinary measures taken during peak demand periods can be so costly that increased sales revenue is lost in additional costs.

Complex Stack

The potential for problems stems from the complexity of operations rather than an inability to plan and anticipate periods of peak demand. Like fashion, retail preferences and markets change very quickly, and in this vertical, the definition of legacy technology is less forgiving than elsewhere.

For example, a decision to make large investments in online retail made just a few years ago may now be eclipsed by the recent trend in consumers wishing to try before they buy in a physical retail store. Warehouse networks and associated technology platforms like DOMs (distributed order management systems) may be optimised for a channel that’s less favoured this year. And next year…who can say?

While XaaS solutions for retailers offer answers to some of the issues around the speed and cost of IT deployments, in some ways, cloud-based solutions exhibit the same underlying problem that so-called legacy platforms present. The issue of interoperability remains to a significant degree, regardless of whether core systems are in-house, cloud-based, monolithic or container-based and cloud-native.

Given that an agile approach to the software used to run a retail operation is optimal (to handle peaks and to change to reflect changes in the market), it’s the interconnection of operational technology that is critical to get right.

API Answers

In an ideal world, every piece of software in the stack would be built using open standards and an API-first approach. However, with many proprietary systems, that’s not entirely the case, and it often isn’t with bespoke, black box software that forms a basis in some enterprises.

Even with every part of the core infrastructure presenting API layers, there remains the significant overhead of developing the data layer that GETs and POSTs to APIs, parses EDI, negotiates FTP, and maintains robust connections.

Setting a development goal of stringing together a unified system that does all that is a fine concept, but it does not account for the moving target of the retail operator’s IT stack: finish an API-based data layer in 12-18 months, and it’s likely that at least one of the connected platforms will change significantly in that timeframe.

Self-made Solutions

A team dedicated to maintaining multi-system interoperability will always find itself reacting to events out of its control, like an API update or application upgrade. In fact, such a team may only be made aware of changes somewhere in a complex topology when production systems break. It’s Sod’s Law, of course, that breaking changes will occur under the real-life stress tests of Black Friday, Cyber Monday or similar.

The number of moving parts in a modern retailer’s technology includes backbone ERPs, point-of-sale, warehousing and distribution, e-commerce platforms and a host of ancillary systems like CRM and Martech. It’s difficult to simulate peak demand stresses to determine where failures or bottlenecks might occur in such a multi-faceted whole and, therefore, develop coherent plans that ensure high levels of performance throughout a retailer’s sales cycle with its inevitable highs and lows.

However, specialist providers exist whose sole purpose is to provide robust connectivity between all the technology elements in modern retail.

Patching for Perfection

Patchworks is a vendor-agnostic cloud platform that addresses the challenge of integration complexity faced by retailers and partners. It creates the data layer concept discussed above and lets users see information flowing in real time from system to system. Via its intuitive interface, it gives up-to-the-minute metrics on orders, stock, distribution system status, and so on – the details are determined, of course, by the platforms used throughout the chain.

Patchworks deployment can be achieved in-house or via one of their certified partners, with a no-code/low-code interface that helps visualise and simplify connectivity between data sources: e-commerce platforms, WMS, DOM, common ERPs, CRMs, databases and business analytics platforms. Essentially anything with an API. Retailers can synchronise inventory, orders, and customer data across various platforms with no specific vendor lock-in or dependent system. That means IT teams can change the elements of the IT stack in production and still retain the rich source of meta-operational data and know that systems will continue to update one another.

It allows a high degree of flexibility and scale and lets companies test their systems under load to better plan and provision for periods of peak demand. The cohesive operational structure means that as the retailer’s business model evolves, new and changing elements can plug-and-play with the rest of the stack. There are also pre-built connectors and applications designed solely for the retail industry, so many operators will find that their production systems can be integrated quickly and reliably.

You can learn more about one of their customers Triumph Motorcycles here, who needed help integrating John Lewis’ The Edge marketplace, as well as Commercetools, VirtualStock and Torque ahead of last year’s peak trading season.

Jim Herbert, CEO at Patchworks emphasised the importance and value of staying connected in a recent interview where he said, “As retailers prepare for peak season, staying connected and agile is crucial. As a proud member of the MACH Alliance and a leader in composable commerce, Patchworks empowers businesses to seamlessly integrate their systems, ensuring a smooth, efficient operation that can adapt to demand surges. This connectivity not only enhances customer experiences but also drives cost effectiveness and revenue growth by optimising every aspect of the retail process all year round.”

You can learn more about Patchworks and the ways it’s unifying retail platforms online and in-store by heading to its website and speaking to a retail sector advisor.

The post Interoperability the Key to Managing Peak Retail Demands appeared first on TechHQ.

There has been a world of difference between the emerging technology of AI and its attainment of the status of being usable every day by ‘normal people’. As a discipline, AI has been around for many years but was consigned to rarefied academic institutions where researchers in computer science, linguistics, and statistical modelling brought the concept from idea to reality. Now, thanks to OpenAI and its ChatGPT model, machine learning has become an everyday, usable system that has a significant impact on people’s lives across multiple areas, particularly in the area of expense management.

Artificial intelligence is finding more uses in many areas, but when models are built from scratch, significant work is needed to tune them to different areas of the business.

AI has been used in finance offices for a while now, for example, in optical character recognition, which is already common practice. Further up the scale of business size, large financial institutions use machine learning to spot fraudulent activity in the multiple transactions that flow through their systems daily.

Now, the same type of algorithms can flag potentially fraudulent expense claims submitted to every Finance department. In small companies, every misspend can have an impact on cashflow that is, in relative terms, worse than in a large corporation.

Source: Rydoo

The usability issue

The big hurdle to adopting any technology, AI included, is usability by the people in the workplace who aren’t necessarily Computing Science graduates. In fact, any technology implementation lives or dies by its uptake by employees.

To implement a finance tool, the software must be intuitive and straightforward for everyone who uses it daily, whether end-users, managers or finance teams. Elements like user interface (UI) design and simple task completion steps make a big difference for all the parties involved. Everything has to be done intuitively and easily, from daily expense claim submission right up to detailed strategic report formulation.

AI can drive wide adoption among a workforce by simplifying individual software choices, automating everyday tasks, and cutting out the mundane, repetitive steps such as submitting an expense claim.

Finance teams also benefit from usable, directed AI-powered software with specialised tools on the same platform as end-users. For example, complex financial compliance regulations can affect many aspects of spending and expense management. Policies might be local to certain jurisdictions, so what’s acceptable to spend in the UK by employees working out of the Zurich office may not be the same as those that apply to UK workers at a conference in the US.

Teams applying those policies to expense claims must be able to upload rules and apply them easily, with clear oversight of their effects. This ability is just as important as the need for a simple-to-use expense submission app or webpage.

How AI tools help save costs

In addition to their usability, expense management software are worth the investment because they can streamline processes and thereby reduce business costs.

If the process of an expense submission is easier and helps prevent fraudulent claims (a way to save costs in itself), then the cost of creating expense reports also falls.

A 2022 report from the Association of Associated Fraud Examiners claims that about 20% of expense reports can contain errors that need to be manually corrected. These errors often start as a mistake when the end-user submits the expense. The same report also states that, on average, it costs £58 to create such a report and a further £50 to correct it. That’s a significant cost burden due in part to the business paying a highly qualified Finance team to sift through line items one by one.

Source: Rydoo

Therefore, it’s simple to see that if an employee’s expense claim process stops misspending as its details are entered, the savings are twofold: less money spent on fraudulent claims and fewer hours spent tracking down potential fraud.

Even a modestly sized business’s Finance team can find itself doing a disproportionate amount of manual work, which is the type of work that AI algorithms can automate away. Among many, it’s just one area where having the right back-end system behind a user-facing expense app is vital for an efficient Finance function.

The necessity of fine-tuning

The AI algorithms in today’s most advanced expense management software have to be adaptable, as no two companies have the same policies. While AI can make decisions and help enforce policies, it’s important for administrators to upload them into the platform so the software can understand the rules and automatically flag or approve expenses, depending on the context. Submitting an expense for a team dinner where alcohol is shown in the receipt might go against policy, while a Board member taking a potential client to dinner and ordering a bottle of wine might be acceptable as an exception, given the context, for example.

AI-driven software allows complex rules and exceptions to cover every eventuality in businesses of any size because there’s no added work burden for Finance teams – it’s the type of work better done by algorithms that work quickly, 24/7 and with virtually no mistakes.

Rydoo understands and targets the pain points teams often experience when controlling expenses. It’s developed a specialised and highly personalised platform with usability at its heart. Rather than an implemention of technology for its own sake, the Rydoo platform addresses the key needs for cost control, smoother processes, compliance with laws and policies, and lowering costs while also providing accurate data and reports.

In later articles, we’ll be looking at some of Rydoo’s capabilities in the sector and focus on specific functionality. But with the right approach and offering the right tools available now, we recommend you find out more for yourself.

⁽¹⁾ Association of Associated Fraud Examiners, 2022, Global Business Travel Association, 2022.

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Today’s priorities for supply chain leaders

Over the last three years, the main focus for many supply chain leaders has been resiliency. Disruptions have been rife, with the chain of events starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing with the blockage of the Suez Canal and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and leading to the impacts of the Red Sea attacks this year.

Resilience can mean different things, from the ability to continue buying inventory and delivering products to schedule, to simply maintaining profit margins. Ultimately, it is about being able to adapt quickly to unforeseen challenges.

Source: Unsplash

A key takeaway from the supply chain disruptions is that the backbone of business resiliency is cost management. At the start of the pandemic, transportation costs increased dramatically, and shippers were buying inventories wherever they could find them. US business logistics costs rose by a record 19.6 percent in 2022, and half of that increase was due to inventory carrying costs.

To remain successful, logistics decision-makers must prioritize both resiliency and cost management. The former means being dynamic and agile, requiring connectedness and real-time data. The latter means reducing expenditure, as high inventory levels and fulfillment & transportation costs could otherwise dent profitability. This is where a unified supply chain helps.

What is a unified supply chain?

Traditionally, in supply chains, transportation and distribution have been managed separately. This siloed approach often led to inefficiencies and missed opportunities for optimization across the entire network. A unified supply chain is an integrated approach to managing all its aspects, from sourcing raw materials to delivering finished products. Components such as distribution, transportation, labor management, and automation work as a cohesive system, usually through a single app. This enables real-time visibility and collaboration across the supply chain network, eliminating silos and redundancy.

At a software level, the Transport Management System (TMS) needs to be connected to the Yard and Warehouse Management System (WMS) to improve operational efficiency. Managers can quickly and easily add capacity, adjust labor to match inbound arrivals, and change orders up to the point that a truck leaves the depot. Such integration streamlines operations, reduces costs, and enhances agility, allowing companies to react quickly to changing market conditions and customer demands.

The benefits of bringing the TMS and WMS together

To achieve a unified supply chain, companies invest in cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, best built from microservices to enable easy integration and scalability. By adopting adaptable and boundary-less solutions, organizations can ensure rapid innovation, personalized customization, and enhanced connectivity across all supply chain functions.

Source: Unsplash

However, according to a recent McKinsey study, logistics leaders have significant concerns regarding technology investment, mostly surrounding the cost of the solution and the impact of change management. Businesses ideally want to lower their total vendor footprint and tech TCO while still boosting their ROI. While these goals may seem at odds with each other, a unified supply chain can ultimately work to achieve them these goals.

A unified supply chain consolidates disparate systems, such as distribution and transport management into a single, integrated solution. Without the need for specialized software for each function, businesses significantly reduce their vendor footprint. This streamlining simplifies technology management and lowers the TCO associated with licensing, maintenance, and support.

Another key characteristic of the unified supply chain is its ease of implementation and adoption compared to traditional, siloed systems. A solution that can be up and running quickly reduces the time-to-value and increases the ROI. Moreover, this lowers support costs by minimizing the need for customization and integration.

Consider Manhattan Active

Manhattan, a leading provider of supply chain management solutions, is the only vendor of a unified supply chain offering. The Manhattan Active Platform gives managers total control over adjuestments for supply, demand, resources, and shipment variations, allowing them to think in terms of inbound and outbound rather than WMS and TMS.

With the platform’s microservices-based architecture and API-first approach, organizations can easily integrate and customize their solution, reducing implementation time and costs. Manhattan Active supports various developmental approaches, including low-code, no-code, and custom coding, enabling IT teams to tailor solutions precisely to their requirements with minimum dependency on external vendors.

Instead of high-cost development to alter monolithic applications, internal teams can easily tune the platform to suit end-users’ requirements quickly and iterate on improvements according to need. And because the platform is cloud-based, core functionality is not affected.

By leveraging computational and behavioral intelligence, the platform optimizes decision-making processes and workforce productivity, ultimately driving cost savings and revenue growth. Manhattan’s cloud-native SaaS model eliminates the need for on-premises infrastructure, reducing maintenance and support costs while increasing scalability and accessibility. Continuous updates every 90 days ensure access to the latest capabilities without additional investment.

To learn more about how bringing together your TMS and WMS into a unified supply chain could transform your business, contact the expert Manhattan team today.

The post What is a unified supply chain, and what are the benefits? appeared first on TechHQ.

Virtual private servers, or VPSs, play an essential role in the developer’s toolbox. They present an isolated development space that can be shared with other users, making a cost-effective solution for deploying alpha or beta applications, testing software and experimenting with configurations. The reserved resources grant full control without putting production systems at risk of interference.

Source: IONOS

But times have changed significantly since VPSs were first introduced at the start of the century. The kinds of projects a typical developer works on have gone from building applications on monolithic architecture to designing complex microservice arrays deployed across distributed cloud environments.

While a developer’s daily work has evolved, standard VPSs haven’t kept pace. Their limited out-of-the-box compatibility with modern DevOps practices and Infrastructure-as-Code environments often makes integration time-consuming. This forces developers to spend significant effort on manual configuration and infrastructure setup, distracting them from core development tasks.

Last June, a study found that UK businesses waste over £10.4 billion each year as developers manually carry out routine tasks. In fact, they spend an average of just 52 minutes a day creating original code. Traditional VPS use has a more direct financial implication, as prepaid models tend to offer limited cost control. Inadvertently exceeding the bandwidth, storage and compute limits can easily lead to budget overruns in the thousands and increase businesses’ cost burden significantly.

A recent study found that 83 per cent of developers experience burnout from work, which isn’t helped by peripheral workloads such as creating and tearing down virtual infrastructure. While the situation could be aided by larger IT teams, 93 percent of businesses say there is an IT skills gap in the UK jobs market, making hiring talented individuals challenging.

As a result of these issues, cloud provider IONOS has created Cloud Cubes. These cost-effective and flexible VPSs are designed specifically to make the developer’s life easier.

These test environments, built on a true cloud platform, precisely replicate your production environment for seamless development progression.

Cloud Cubes provide a more comprehensive and user-friendly solution than a standard VPS and are built on data-secure, GDPR-compliant infrastructure, so code can move from dev to QA to prod without any heavy lifting. They also offer transparent pay-as-you-go, per-minute billing to prevent overspending. A set of REST APIs allows for easy connection to applications and ensures complete embedding into distributed IT environments.

Source: IONOS

Container-based technologies also offer a compelling development runtime alternative to virtual machines. Lightweight, portable, and scalable, they free developers to focus on coding rather than system configuration, streamlining continuous integration (CI). This aligns with modern CI/CD workflows, allowing resources to be dynamically allocated on-demand, eliminating bottlenecks caused by manual configuration while code awaits execution.

Cloud-native tools like Kubernetes can be used to automate scaling, load balancing and fault tolerance, ensuring optimal resource allocation.

IONOS offers a Managed Kubernetes service that offers flexible configuration options for efficient resource utilisation and, therefore, cost management. It makes commissioning workspaces quick and easy via the optional Cloud-Init feature, using the supplied SDK or APIs. Setting template values for users and permissions, for example, makes fast replication of environments simple.

With enhanced flexibility, integration, performance and management capabilities, Cloud Cubes and Managed Kubernetes are well-suited for developers looking to optimise their workloads for modern application development and deployment needs.

Sign up for a free trial today to discover more about how Cloud Cubes can make your life easier and bring immediate benefits to your team.

The post Why traditional VPSs are no longer fit for the modern developer appeared first on TechHQ.

Businesses both big and small spend millions developing and crafting their brand, based on carefully-crafted customer experiences. Reputations in all industries are more quickly lost than built. There is a saying that a dissatisfied customer tells ten people, while a recommendation reaches just one.

And with customer expectations being set high thanks to the convenience of apps and the internet, it’s surprising that many companies seem willing to opt for second-best in their logistics choices. A logistics operator (or logistics function in a larger business) has a significant opportunity, therefore, to differentiate itself from the competition. It does this by providing a service that’s focused on the qualities trusted to it by the brand(s) it works for. At the core of brand values is the end-user’s experience.

Source: Alpega Group

At the heart of the issue are some seemingly simple enough expectations: customers expect trouble-free deliveries and returns; they appreciate transparent tracking of consignments; they rely on clear communications throughout. Increasingly, too, customers want to use companies where green issues like efficiency and low-waste services are employed, and they rightly expect trustworthiness, as few delays as possible, and overall professionalism.

Shippers successful in achieving these requirements can expect business growth, almost by proxy, but as we shall see, the processes and systems required to provide world-class logistics also enable companies to expand operations effortlessly into new markets and territories.

As you might expect from a website dedicated to business technology, we believe the pursuit of business transport excellence is best undertaken by means of digital systems: platforms that connect inventory management, route optimization, real-time tracking, scheduling and more, right along the supply chain. Connecting a logistics company’s existing systems with those of supply chain partners is important for visibility, and automation can remove a huge amount of manual processing by staff.

Basing operations on digital solutions brings additional benefits, too, ones that are never specifically seen by customers but enhance and optimize logistics operations creating indirect benefits for customers. Information accrued from new-generation logistics platforms becomes a resource for analysis, can have machine-learning algorithms applied to it, and informs strategies to further optimize operations.

To borrow from the vocabulary of software developers, the process of improvement becomes iterative; that is, small changes, one after another, build an improving operation. Vendors of technology often claim, wrongly, that their solutions are immediately revolutionary. It’s important to remember that in supply chain technology, change is brought about by logistics professionals using the best tools, deployed in ways that further the business’s goals. Experienced people who work in business transport know that maintaining standards (and, therefore, reputation) is paramount, and the tools at their disposal are just that: the means by which efficiency and customer satisfaction are achieved.

Attaining superior logistics capabilities is tough in 2024 because of the number of moving parts and the complexities of everyday operations right along the supply chain. The best business transport management solutions reflect the number of entities present (like third-party partners) and the variables involved, adopting a modular approach to required capabilities.

At the same time, it’s important to recognize that despite complexity, there must be clear oversight over the entire range of operations. With that, the possibilities of automation and simplification become apparent. What were previously nice-to-haves like, for instance, a real-time, informative customer portal become relatively simple to implement.

At its core, a good business transport software system is data-driven, but is primarily a set of tools used by experienced logistics pros who know their business and are able to enact the business’s strategy: for improved customer experience, for efficiency and lower cost, and to build market differentiation.

Source: Alpega Group

The data grounding of today’s logistics management systems creates possibilities, too. Modeling of potential changes becomes lower-risk, because so-called ‘digital twins’ – the trialing of new ideas and strategies – mean that customers are not unwitting guinea pigs for experimental change. The digitally-fluent company can base its strategies on empirical data from existing operations, data that can be enhanced by third-party information sources and processed by algorithms designed for the industry. Modules that connect supply chain partners’ systems to give wider, deeper knowledge to the logistics operator create the basis on which true customer satisfaction is based. To use some marketing terminology, customers in time can become brand advocates.

When global events and local conditions affect supply chain and sourcing, from regional conflict to labor shortages, the challenges to achieving BTE (Business Transport Excellence) are many. A reactive approach to problems is sometimes unavoidable, well outside the control of the individual. But a proactive approach to choosing and using platforms and systems on which logistics operations take place is possible. Of the best global players in cloud-based, extensible transport management systems is Alpega. In 2024, it launches its “Business Transport Excellence” platform, bringing together all its solutions for shippers and carriers in a single platform. The integrated approach reflects how supply chains work and what they are capable of.

To find out more about Aplega’s offerings and how they can instill differentiating change, contact a representative near you today.

The post Customer experience driving logistics digitally appeared first on TechHQ.

The realm of transport and logistics has had a wild last four years. Disruptive factors include the COVID-19 pandemic, technological advancements (particularly in AI), economic conditions, geopolitics, climate change, regulatory shifts, and the increasing demand for digitalisation in the industry.

These challenges continue to shape and influence the sector globally but morph into new shapes that may take time to recognise. With help from logistics experts at Descartes Systems Group, TechHQ clarifies four central emerging logistics and transportation trends set to influence business success in 2024.

1. Labour shortages

A recent Descartes study found that 76 percent of organisations are experiencing notable workforce shortages. The road transport sector specifically faces a pressing challenge with a shortage of HGV and van drivers, disrupting the timely delivery of goods across various industries. Manufacturing, healthcare, and e-commerce sectors, all heavily reliant on transportation, bear the brunt of this. To counteract its effects, companies must consider investing in driver retention initiatives and competitive compensation packages. The latest route optimisation software will also help to maximise delivery capacity without adding new drivers or vehicles. In the future automation solutions like autonomous vehicles for efficient last-mile delivery operations may become the norm.

2. Rising costs

Escalating expenses, encompassing labour, fuel, and raw materials, will impact businesses’ bottom lines in all sectors. Experts say that the price of diesel is poised to rise sharply in the coming year, impacting the bottom line of many companies that rely on road transport. Manufacturers are likely to see elevated production costs, whereas service industries could grapple with increased operational expenses. Effective cost management strategies such as process streamlining, enhancing supply chain efficiency, and astute sourcing practices will be imperative for businesses. Additionally, embracing sustainable methodologies and integrating energy-efficient technologies can provide long-term relief from cost pressures.

Source: Descartes Systems Group

3. Customer experience

The so-called ‘Amazon effect’ – where customers put more pressure on their supplier to know where their product is – has pushed customer expectations in logistics and home delivery to new heights. A Descartes study in 2023 revealed that 67 percent of consumers experienced a home delivery problem in the three-month period surveyed, and 68 percent took some form of action against the retailer or delivery company. Adapting to these expectations means that retailers should offer a range of costed delivery options and implement tighter time windows for deliveries.

Monitoring driver performance and providing real-time delivery status information to customers based on accurate GPS location data will help to manage proactively expectations. Ensuring third-party delivery agents reinforce the retailer’s brand and delivers to the same standards is essential. Businesses can enhance the overall customer experience by focusing on these areas, driving their respective industries’ satisfaction, loyalty, and competitiveness levels.

4. New business models

Companies are urged to embrace new business models centred around innovative logistics and electronic customer engagement in response to the imperative to reduce costs and enhance customer satisfaction. Distribution industries are transitioning from fixed delivery cycles to hybrid routes, improving cost-efficiency and service responsiveness. These adaptable models hold promise for replication across all sectors. Additionally, adopting eco-friendly delivery options, such as consolidating orders for weekly delivery and leveraging technology to identify more sustainable delivery routes, not only meets growing consumer demands for environmentally conscious practices but also contributes to cost reduction. As delivery strategies evolve, logistics leaders are encouraged to seek inspiration beyond their sector and seize new opportunities.

Meeting these challenges with digital transformation

Meeting the above challenges to drive success in 2024 and beyond necessitates a new approach accessible through digitisation. For example, by harnessing advanced analytics, AI and machine learning, companies can gain comprehensive insights into fleet operations, optimising routes and resource allocation to effectively navigate labour shortages and rising costs.

Integrated customer engagement platforms provide clients real-time updates and self-service options, fostering transparency and trust while reducing operational strain. Furthermore, proactive drivers’ hours management, coupled with innovative mobile solutions, ensure a culture of safety and compliance, mitigate risks and enhance overall operational efficiency.

Source: Descartes Systems Group

The unique needs of high-volume carriers can be met with enhanced strategic and operational modeling capabilities. Integration with tachograph remote download devices enables intelligent route planning, ensuring compliance with drivers’ hours regulations while optimising resource usage. State-of-the-art load optimisation software enhances load-building accuracy, maximising payload capacity and minimising transportation costs.

The Descartes effect

Descartes route optimisation and delivery scheduling software offers transport operators and fleet managers an integrated solution to help address the challenges of labour shortages, rising costs, poor customer experiences and outdated business models. Descartes is seen as a trusted advisor for thousands of fleet operators, driven by the success of its customers. Global brands like Royal Canin, Ontex, and Sonepar – each with fleets from 15 to thousands of vehicles – have found savings and enhanced customer experiences by employing software solutions that optimise their logistics and fleet management processes. Schedule a consultation with the expert team today to discover how Descartes can take your business to new heights in 2024.

The post Breaking down the top four trends set to influence road transport and logistics in 2024 appeared first on TechHQ.

• Know Your Customer is a mandatory part of online transactions.
• Prohibitive costs form barrier to entry.
• Linux Foundation backs open source alternative.

READ NEXT

The ABCs of KYC: What is “Know Your Customer”?

While the possibilities of taking payments online offers both parties in a transaction massive convenience, the threat of online fraud is ever-present. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance reports that close to $1 trillion was lost to online fraud in 2023, a cost that increases secondary business costs paid in insurance premiums, payment gateway fees, and a host of other quiet additions to everyday bills that land each month on the desks of CFOs worldwide.

An integral part of digital payment processes is the myriad routines that run background checks on every transaction, like identity lookup, heuristic pattern recognition for anomalous behavior, and payment detail verification.

“World Trade Center, Bahrain” by Ahmed Rabea is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

These often furiously complex algorithms run quietly in the background, providing services like KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti-money laundering). They’re provided by reputable payment gateways and identity verification systems as a matter of course. Naturally, they come at a cost, one that’s pretty much mandatory whan running a lawful business and one that’s usually sold at a price that can be dictated by providers – as such, it’s rarely cheap.

However, that situation seems set to change in the near future, as the Linux Foundation Charities (with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) has launched Tazama, an open source alternative to proprietary anti-fraud measures whose cost is often prohibitive, especially for organizations in the developing world. According to a press release from Linux Foundation Charities (LF Charities), it includes capabilities for fraud detection, AML compliance, and monitoring of online financial transactions. That means it should be able to provide as much know your customer data as traditional closed systems.

The service will be hosted by LF Charities (although its open source nature will enable independent hosting) and so act as a showcase for the efficacy of open source as a secure, independent, low-cost replacement for closed and costly systems.

“Cr48: Disabling boot verification” by jamalfanaian is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said, “We are excited to see an open source solution that not only enhances financial security but also provides a platform for our community to actively contribute to a project with broad societal impacts.”

“The launch of Tazama signifies another stride towards securing and democratizing digital financial services,” said Kosta Peric, Deputy Director, Payment Systems at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

READ NEXT

Taking the fight to financial crime with blockchain tech

Greg McCormick, the Executive Director of Tazama, claims the platform has achieved 2,300 full payment transactions per second (TPS), which supports the type of throughput considered vital for a smooth and reassuring customer experience. The presence of delays, glitches, and timeouts is an anathema to payment processes (in B2C transactions, especially), as they suggest an unstable platform and worry users that they might be subject to fraud.

Several organizations are already working with Tazama to assess the platform’s effectiveness, including African organizations BCEAO and BankservAfrica, IPSL in the UK, and Jordan’s JoPACC. While emerging markets may be interested because of the lower potential cost of entry to a reliable payment platform, the overriding benefit of the open source Tazama will be the many thousands of eyes-on that will be able to attest to the veracity of the system and improve it overall.

The reputation of proprietary software in security-sensitive areas makes the case for Tazama. The experiences of Okta, SolarWinds, Lastpass and a half-dozen other companies suggests that in the area of highly-sensitive data, a limited number of developers and the tendency to place shareholder dividends before quality of product tends to create less secure software.

The post Tazama offers Know Your Customer options for all appeared first on TechHQ.

Cybersecurity professionals are in exceptional demand

Research by Gartner has predicted that by 2025, nearly half of all cybersecurity leaders will look to change jobs, with a quarter of them leaving the industry due to work-related stressors. The responsibility cybersec leaders have is rising thanks to the evolving landscape of cyber threats, which constantly demand innovative solutions and proactive defences. Another study from (ISC)² found that nearly 70 percent of cyber professionals claim their organization doesn’t currently have enough cybersecurity staff. Gartner said the resulting talent shortage will ultimately be responsible for over half of significant cyber incidents. Such events are costly, both in the direct financial sense through operational downtime and data recovery, and in the form of reputational damage.

Source: DartPoints

The manufacturing industry is the most vulnerable to cyber attacks

The problem is particularly relevant in manufacturing, which was the top industry affected by ransomware in 2023. The sector is becoming increasingly connected through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), incorporating sensors, actuators, and other devices networked together with computers’ industrial applications. This expands the attack surface available for cyber criminals to exploit to gain unauthorized access, disrupt operations, or steal sensitive data.

Manufacturers are also often targeted because a successful attack can impact all equipment and IIoT devices, leading to complete operational stoppage, with ripple effects on the supply chain. For example, in 2022, a ransomware attack on Kojima Industries Corporation, a vehicle parts manufacturer, forced Toyota to shut down 14 factories for 24 hours.

Additional common challenges the industry faces include intellectual property theft, user error, phishing, and espionage. It is therefore essential that manufacturers have robust business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plans in place.

The security benefits of cloud or co-location services

The cyber security measures available to manufacturing businesses largely depend on where they store their critical data, whether on-premises, with a cloud service provider, or at a colocation data center.

On-premises infrastructure involves hosting servers locally, while colocation provides secure data center space for servers and equipment. Cloud services offer virtualized resources accessible over the internet, enabling on-demand access to computing power and storage. Many organizations have been moving away from on-premises infrastructure for several years due to its high upfront costs and maintenance requirements. Colocation and cloud services eliminate these expenses and offer greater scalability and flexibility, catering to the fluctuating demands of the manufacturing industry. Organizations that utilize colo and cloud can easily scale up resources in response to growth or a need for increased computing power for data analysis and other applications.

On top of this, colocation and cloud service providers tend to offer advanced security features that are not available when hosting on-premises. These might include physical measures like biometric access and 24/7 surveillance, or network features like advanced firewalls, intrusion detection systems, EDR/MDR, SIEM, and DDoS protection. They can encrypt customer or financial data in transit and at rest, providing an additional layer of security for the most sensitive information.

The provider should conduct regular security audits to ensure compliance with the industry standards relevant to manufacturing and data protection, like the SOC, HIPAA, and NIST frameworks. These can significantly ease a manufacturing company’s burden of achieving and maintaining compliance independently. Outsourcing IT infrastructure to colocation or cloud service providers also supplies businesses with additional third-party expertise. The third-party team can provide deeper insights into existing and emerging threats while offering invaluable guidance about how the company might best detect and defend against them. This allows manufacturers to allocate resources more efficiently, focusing on their core competencies while leaving cybersecurity management to the experts.

Source: DartPoints

Colocation and cloud services can form essential components of BCDR plans for organizations. They offer geo-redundancy, ensuring data and applications are replicated across multiple locations to minimize downtime during disasters or cyberattacks. These services also provide reliable data backup solutions, enabling the swift restoration of operations from secure offsite backups to reduce losses. Transitioning to cloud or colocation solutions with a trusted third party can help ensure long-term cybersecurity and operational resilience, providing peace of mind to a highly targeted industry.

Consider DartPoints

DartPoints, a leading provider of colocation, cloud, and cybersecurity, stands out as an invaluable partner for organizations grappling with the escalating threat of cyber attacks.

With a comprehensive suite of tailored cybersecurity solutions, DartPoints provides a unique, multi-layered defense strategy to safeguard manufacturing operations. Its approach encompasses round-the-clock monitoring, robust security protocols, and advanced technologies such as firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, and sophisticated DDoS mitigation tools, ensuring that sensitive manufacturing data and intellectual property remain secure. Moreover, DartPoints offers regular data backup and fast recovery solutions, guaranteeing swift restoration in the event of data loss, while high levels of redundancy and failover capability minimize downtime during disasters.

The company’s customizable security postures cater to manufacturing companies’ unique risk profiles and business requirements, ensuring that security measures are aligned with specific operational needs, reporting requirements, or compliance standards. With 24/7 support and security monitoring services, manufacturing organizations can rely on DartPoints to provide unparalleled protection against cyber threats.

It responds to incidents much faster than a limited in-house team could, and boasts an uptime SLA of 99.999 percent. Its bases across the eastern US ensure low-latency connectivity and easy access.

Discover how cloud and co-location services from DartPoints can protect your manufacturing business from cyber attacks by visiting its website or speaking to one of the team today.

The post How cloud and co-location services can protect manufacturers against the rising threat of cyber attacks appeared first on TechHQ.

• Spotify among companies complaining about Apple EU developer terms & conditions.
• Anti-competitive practices make sideloading more expensive.
• Software companies likely to keep working under existing Apple terms & conditions.

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Digital Markets Act: Will latest EU rules herald a new era for Big Tech?

With iOS 17.4 due to be released in the coming week, 30 companies have penned an open letter to the European Commission, media groups, and lobby organizations, stating their concerns about Apple’s terms and conditions, which they claim will still leave the company in contravention of the EU’s Digital Markets Act.

To comply with the DMA, Apple is now allowing third-party app stores and the sideloading of applications downloaded independently. Developers will be given a choice between signing up to Apple’s new terms or sticking with the existing T&Cs, which the group claims is a “false choice.” The new terms, the signatories claim, will “hamper fair competition with potential alternative payment providers.”

“Rotten apples” by fotologic is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

To aid developers in their choice, Apple provides a handy calculator to guide them through the myriad available options. Users in the EU select whether they will qualify for the App Store Small Business Program, what App Store fees they would pay, and the value of in-app purchases they predict users will pay – under new and old terms.

What will surprise absolutely no one is that developers will end up paying more money to Apple if they choose to allow their apps to be sideloaded than they currently pay under existing terms. They will also have the cost of running an app store, a customer support function, and a payment processor. For developers, keeping business as usual under Apple’s existing terms results in greater revenue. The only way to preserve income under Apple’s new terms with apps served from a third-party store is to raise the price that consumers pay.

This puts some of the more hyperbolic language of the open letter to the European Commission into context. It claims that “Apple is rendering the DMA‘s goals of offering more choice and more control to consumers useless.” Consumers will rarely have a choice to sideload an app or download it from a third-party store because no application developers will opt to make less money.

The letter states:

“New app stores are critical to driving competition and choice both for app developers and consumers. Sideloading will give app developers a real choice between the Apple App Store or their own distribution channel and technology. Apple’s new terms do not allow for sideloading and make the installation and use of new app stores difficult, risky and financially unattractive for developers. Rather than creating healthy competition and new choices, Apple’s new terms will erect new barriers and reinforce Apple’s stronghold over the iPhone ecosystem.”

Apple’s new terms do “allow for sideloading” – in this, the letter is incorrect – but its terms are deliberately anti-competitive. The company is indeed “[making] a mockery of the DMA and the considerable efforts by the European Commission and EU institutions to make digital markets competitive.”

Something rotten in the state of Apple? Suuuurely not? “rotten apple” by johnwayne2006 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

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European hammer of justice to fall on big tech?

It would be naive to believe that the signatories of the letter are beating a drum for consumers’ right to choose where they source their apps from. The motives of Epic Games, Spotify, Uptodown, et al. are as mercenary and cynical as Apple’s. They expected to make more money thanks to the DMA‘s imposition but have been thwarted, at least for now. The ‘Apple Tax’ payed by companies with apps on the App Store is a thorn in the side to shareholders dependent on Apple’s App Store.

For the next few years, European taxpayers will fund the inevitable legal battle they will wage on behalf of the likes of Spotify (2023 Q4 revenue €3.7 billion, €68 million in adjusted operating profits) and Epic Games (valued at $31.5 billion in 2023), so justice can be granted to these stalwart defenders of consumer choice.

Under the Digital Markets Act, violators may be fined up to 10% of worldwide global turnover, which would amount to approximately $38 billion plus change. Likely for Apple, it won’t come to that, but as ever, Cupertino can afford its lawyers’ salaries for a few years until it can find ways to recoup the costs of operating in a competitive market – at least, in the EU. Developers and consumers in the US, UK, and elsewhere can look forward to business as usual.

Track available on both iTunes and Spotify…

The post Spotify, Epic decry Apple terms under EU compliance appeared first on TechHQ.

• Inkitt AI help for writers shows successful patterns.
• Success delivered by what are proven to be winning formulae.
• We look forward to Fast & Furious 52‘s release in 2066.

The latest $37m funding round for the self-publishing platform Inkitt was awarded at least in part due to its intention to use large language models that work on behalf of its authors. The AI will guide submissions to the eponymous app in areas such as readability, plot, and characterization.

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Where to go when Z library’s down

Self-publishing is hugely popular among authors. It circumvents the often-frustrating processes of finding an agent, receiving rejections from established publishing houses, and lessening any income from a work thanks to parties in the chain who each take a cut of revenues generated by sales. An AI-powered virtual assistant can help authors with advice and offer changes to a text that are drawn from previously successful stories.

Inkitt’s AI amalgamates the output from several large language models to find trends in the enormous body of previously published books, giving writers help to align their work with already successful and popular works. At first sight, its approach is clearly more appropriate than having ‘authors’ simply use an AI to create words for a book. It’s also a step above once-respected news outlets using AI to write stories. But a deeper understanding of how large language models work informs us that the boundaries of creativity possible with AI are claustrophobic.

“Cuba book” by @Doug88888 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Whether in video, visual art, game design, or text, machine learning algorithms are educated on extant publications. Over the period of the learning phase, they process large quantities of data, and learn patterns that can then be used to reproduce material similar to that in the body of learning data.

In the case of a novel or screenplay’s structure, then, what’s succeeded in the past (in terms of popularity and, often, revenue generated) can be teased out from the also-rans. It’s a process that is as old as creativity itself, albeit a habit that’s formed without digital algorithmic help. Hollywood industry experts can produce lists of formulae that work for the plot, the rhythm of narrative flow, characterization, and so on. Such lists, whether ephemeral or real, inform the commissioning and acceptance of new works that will have the best chance to succeed.

The threat to creativity from the models used in ways like that proposed by Inkitt is twofold. The most obvious is one of the repetition of successful formulae. This means, depending on your choice of language, works that are on-trend, derivative, zeitgeisty, or repetitious.

The second threat comes from the probability curves embedded into the AI code. The degree of exception from the average of any creative work chewed up by an algorithm will always be diminished. What can’t be judged particularly easily is what makes something an exception and whether it’s different from the average because it’s badly created or because it’s superbly created. Truly fantastic creative works may be given a lesser weight because they don’t conform to a number of other factors, like sentence length or a color palette that is (currently) familiar.

The effect is one of standardization and averaging across the gamut of creative output so that a product is successfully conformist to the mean. Standardization equals conforming, which equals success. But standardization leads inexorably to stagnation.

In practical uses of AI today, many of the traits and methods of models are perfect for their designed purpose. Data analytics of spending patterns informs vendors’ choices for new product development based on what sells well. Outliers and exceptions have little importance and are rightly ignored by the model’s probability curve.

But in areas of creating new art, product design, music composition, or text creation, the exceptions can have value, a value that is increased by not conforming to average patterns of success, readability, aesthetic attractiveness, characterization, or one of a thousand other variables at play. If conformity to guidelines means success, then how we define success is the interesting question. History is littered with composers, artists and writers who didn’t conform, and were succesful during their lifetimes or posthumously. Plenty too who were succesful conformists. And many who kicked against prevailing strictures and got nowhere, dying in poverty.

“book” by VV Nincic is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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A win for open access as Z-library goes physical

So what help can AI actually deliver for writers? As in many areas of life and business, it can work well as a tool, but it cannot – or at least should not – be allowed to dictate the creative elements of art.

By reducing creativity to an algorithmically generated idea of “what works,” talent that’s non-conforming is immediately stymied. It depends, of course, on what the creator’s desired outcome is, or how they deem themselves to be succeful. If they want a greater chance of achieving mainstream popularity, then the Inkitt AI will help guide them in what to change to better fit into the milieu. Many dream of being the scriptwriter or 3D visual designer for the next movie blockbuster, and there is value in that. Inkitt may make people better writers, but it’s the individual’s idea of what a ‘better’ writer is that will inform their decision whether or not to sign up.

Individual human voices can make great creative works. But by placing those works inside a mass of mediocrity (and worse) and teaching an algorithm to imitate the mean, what’s produced is only ever, at best, going to be slightly better than average. As more content is created by AI and it too becomes part of the learning corpora of machine learning algorithms, AIs will become self-replicating, but not in the manner of dystopian sci-fi. Much of the future’s published content will just be very, very dull.

Oatmeal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Amalgamating for the sellable mean turns tears of human creativity into nothing more than raindrops in the flood.

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