This month’s column is going to seem like a hodgepodge and I apologize upfront for that.
The reality is I had a couple of interesting concepts come across my desk over the past few weeks that I wanted to share because they’re cool, they’re about technology and they relate to supply chains. And there’s only a tenuous link to bind them, so bear with me.
First, let’s talk about latency. In a discussion in January with Fab Brasca, JDA Software’s vice president of solution strategy, he talked about the major difference between transportation management systems and warehouse management systems, and he mentioned latency.
At American Shipper, we’ve rarely dived headfirst into the WMS pool, but with companies viewing their warehousing strategy as more intrinsically connected to transportation strategy (re: the omni-channel mandate), it was an interesting thread to explore.
Brasca’s argument is that the decisions made within a TMS are less reliant on the instantaneous response time of a system than those made within a WMS. Hence, why companies have gravitated toward cloud-based TMS more readily than to cloud-based WMS.
He said there is a perception that there is more latency in updating critical information through cloud applications.
“Whether that’s accurate or not, that’s the perception,” he said. “WMS has a higher degree of transaction processing, so there’s a fear that if you centralize it, it won’t be fast enough, particularly when you get into high-volume retail warehouse operations. [With a cloud-based TMS], you might not care about a carrier tender taking a few extra seconds, but if you have a guy on a forklift waiting for a picking instruction, there can’t be a delay.”
It got me thinking about how the practical use of systems still differs so greatly from the actual capabilities of these systems. Most companies don’t use a fraction of the capabilities of the systems they buy, and yet they get hung up on perceptions of latency. Bear in mind, we’re talking about seconds of latency, not even minutes.
The fact is, when a company is procuring or managing transportation, there’s often plenty of time to make decisions. It’s having the capability at all to influence cargo in-transit that’s the real goal.
So here’s the second topic. A colleague pointed me in the direction of a concept I still haven’t really been able to get my head around: the idea of transporting so-called quantum bits, or qubits, by containership.
I won’t even try to explain what qubits are (you’re seriously better off Googling this yourself), but the broad idea is that scientists believe global data transfer could be immensely faster, with exponentially more bandwidth, through the use of quantum physics.
The thinking goes like this: replace the Internet with a quantum version. Only problem is quantum physics relies on photons, which don’t travel well through established physical infrastructure like fiber optic cables.
In 2014, some professors in Japan came up with a theory to literally ship these qubits aboard a ship and sail them between continents. Otherwise, this quantum Internet would be confined to smaller geographical “islands.” Suffice it to say, this is the pre-school interpretation of a very complex concept. The real purpose of transporting the qubits is because there’s apparently a phenomenon where two quantum objects share the same existence even when they are vast distances apart. The “good” being transported on the ship is actually the entanglement of the pair of pieces of information. Yeah, I don’t really get it either.
All I can think of is that the ship essentially delivers the equivalent of a decoder ring, allowing the information locked in the entangled pair to be cracked. I’m sure that’s wrong, but it’s fun to think of containerships going all of 18 knots somehow being responsible for sparking an incomprehensibly faster version of the Internet. An analog solution to an eminently digital problem.
So there’s your thread—latency.
Sometimes we worry so much about the speed of our information that we forget how slow things were even a year ago. Our minds are quick to forget how we coped before, and eager to explore how fast things can go—a sort of Doppler Effect of technological expectation.
Let’s remember the good things about the time it takes to transport goods across continents. Global supply chains take time. Purchase order to delivery into a distribution center generally takes weeks, if not months (at least for goods moving by ocean). And while we often focus on the downside to that lead time, the positive is that allows for more time to influence the state of the goods in transit.
Instantaneous isn’t always best, and that’s a good thing for transportation, because unless someone figures out how to teleport goods a la Star Trek, there will always be some latency in transit times, even for production that’s been nearshored.
The key is using that latency in concert with ever-quickening data generation and communication. Armed with the right systems and the tools to visualize data, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that it takes 14 days to move a box from Shenzhen to Los Angeles, and another few days to Chicago. That latency creates space to optimize, redirect, or recover. After all, the human mind is not made of qubits.
CIO Insight: Latency and qubits
