Gartner Vice President of Research Bart De Muynck will speak on shippers’ transportation technology strategies and road maps in a live presentation at FreightWaves’ F3 Virtual Experience at approximately 10 a.m. ET Thursday.
In addition to Thursday’s live presentation, De Muynck will host two sessions at F3, one focusing on advanced analytics and the other on sustainability in transportation and logistics. De Muynck is a 30-year supply chain veteran, beginning at Penske Logistics, then Elemica, nearly a decade at PepsiCo as an enterprise architect, followed by seven and a half years at Gartner.
De Muynck’s recent publications at Gartner include “How to Measure, Monitor, and Improve Data Quality in Transportation Visibility,” “How to Use Technology to Optimize Your Transportation Procurement,” “Magic Quadrant for Real-Time Transportation Visibility Platforms,” and “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems.” De Muynck’s market guides and Magic Quadrants for Gartner have become important documents for critically analyzing the space and comparing the strengths and weaknesses of competing technology vendors serving the transportation and logistics industry.
“The recent supply chain disruptions have made companies rethink their supply chain strategies,” De Muynck said. “Conventional strategies no longer work in a world that faces increasing complexity. As companies put stronger emphasis on digital models and technology, they need to approach this strategically to build a solid foundation for future success. I will challenge the conventional thinking and lay out a general approach to build a strategy for transportation technology that fits your organization and maturity.”
De Muynck’s expertise lies in advising enterprise shippers on how to build out a transportation technology stack that matches their supply chain capabilities, taking into account geography and transportation mode but also more advanced requirements like forecasting, dynamic inventory management and supply chain resilience.
De Muynck’s talk on advanced analytics covers the emerging importance of synthetic data, or data generated by algorithm that’s used to fill in gaps and power high-quality models. Synthetic data has become more important than ever in improving data integrity — especially for applications that ingest data from multiple sources — for the purposes of calculation and prediction.
“Synthetic data has been around for years, but it’s often seen as a lower-quality substitute, useful only in certain situations where real data is inconvenient to get, expensive or constrained by regulation,” De Muynck said. “But the reality is that this conventional wisdom completely misses the true potential of synthetic data. Far from fake, an afterthought or a necessity due to privacy regulations, the fact is that you won’t be able to build high-quality, high-value AI models without synthetic data. That is why synthetic data is on a trajectory to go from a sideshow to becoming the main force behind the future of AI.”
De Muynck will also speak on sustainability trends in transportation and logistics, where measuring and forecasting carbon emissions is the necessary first step to designing network and modal strategies to reduce emissions. Replacing carbon-intensive transportation assets with net-zero vehicles is also coming, likely in short-haul scenarios like yard hostlers and final-mile delivery first.
“There has been a steady overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in recent years,” De Muynck said. “However, the transport sector has not followed this general trend and, as a result, its relative contribution to overall GHG emissions has become more significant. Transportation is now responsible for about 29% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.”
Register for the F3 Virtual Experience here.