Technology in an analog world
This of course is in the United States were Amazon is a household name. Amazon wants to help launch small businesses in the US that will take their packages on the last step of the journey from Amazon to the person who ordered it. That last step of the journey is from the sorting center to the doorstep. Amazon of course has the needed volume, shipping 5 billion packages a year globally. It is another fine example of technology enabling more new business models in the analog world. Because without all of the IT that does into delivering packages, and believe me there is a lot of that. Just think of:
- – track and trace,
- – optical character recognition to see where something needs to go to
- – fraud detection.
So, although delivering packages is something that you need to do in the real world, there is a tremendous amount of data flowing from one to the other. I would be surprised that if in the customized Amazon branded vans every even more IoT technology. Other delivery services in the US use delivery data from trucks scanning devices and machine learning based models to turn off the engine when they know that the driver is going to be away for a number of seconds that will make it economically and environmentally feasible to turn of the engine. Behind all of that very tangible package delivery there is a whole world of IT going on in the background.
Another remarkable thing is that Amazon does not block the delivery people to also work for other companies that have packages to deliver, at least that’s what we get from the information that has been released.
What do you need?
What kind of IT are we talking about when we talk about the setup like this? Well surely you will need an API manager solution somewhere that will manage the applications APIs so that only those people were allowed to access the API, pick up packages and deliver them. With the number of scanning and touch points in the delivery process it’s not hard to imagine an advanced track and trace allowing optimization. Especially when you take into account whether as well as traffic conditions on the delivery route. When you are talking about third-party systems, it is not likely that you will have some mediation and transformation because the data you get from a third-party system might not be the data in a form that you can actually use it.
Making choices
You can only do this as a company when you have the right IT infrastructure with the right solutions in place. Solutions that will allow you to capture the data and analyze it perhaps even use some machine learning algorithm on it in order to create a model to optimize delivery. With all of the integrations that are likely to be needed to create a mesh network of partners and services an Enterprise Service Bus is likely to be another indispensable part of your IT landscape. So, if you want to become an Amazon like innovator in your business you know what you need to get! If you are curious about the features and capabilities that such solutions have I would advise you to read our selection guide on Enterprise Service Bus that you can download from below.
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