Watch: Digitalisation is Driving Speed and Efficiency Today

The first session of TLME’s Future-Proof Technologies Conference began with conference moderator and industry thought leader Lars Jensen asking panellists about the state of automation in the industry today and what was the outlook over the next few years?

Dr Jonathan Beard, Partner, Infrastructure Advisory, Strategy & Transactions, EY, said that digitalisation was the most important and most pervasive technology transformation in the industry today. Technologies like AI, IoT and data analytics are driving efficiency and cost effectiveness.

Real equipment automation was still in its early stages with fully automated terminals implemented in a few places across the world where there was a business case for it and “return on capital made sense”.

Based out of Hong Kong, Dr Beard says he has seen a lot of automation in air cargo operations that despite being capital intensive were already profitable thanks to government incentives.

Dr Beard concluded by saying that although automation created more resilient supply chains, today, digitalisation is what was driving the logistics industry and Covid has helped to “turbo charge” the same.