Technology has undoubtedly played a part in shaping the e-commerce industry in recent years especially when the pandemic has resulted in more retail stores and services shifting online. Given the rise in customer expectations for convenient and sustainable solutions, businesses had to speedily adapt to the changes to keep ahead of their competition. Since emerging technology trends continue to have a significant impact on the retail sector, ⁠— influenced by new technologies, changing consumer needs and the constant shift from physical to digital — e-commerce companies will require the right knowledge and tools now more than ever to ensure that they do not lag behind.

Parcel Perform’s Founder and CCO, Dana von der Heide, attended the Ecommerce Operations Technology Summit 2022 recently, where she was a speaker in her session, titled “Unlocking the Power of Delivery Data for an Integrated Customer Experience”. She has gathered some key highlights and valuable insights from the event such as sustainability in the last mile, supply chain visibility and more.

Ecommerce Operations Technology Summit 2022

Ecommerce Operations Technology Summit 2022 took place from 12 to 13 April 2022 in Orlando, Florida. The conference brought together over 40 industry experts to speak about the necessary tools to meet today’s operational challenges, and strategies to achieve tomorrow’s technological success. Dedicated to sharing insight and ideas that help businesses set up their future-ready DTC operations, the summit covered key topics from warehousing to workforce management, cybersecurity to robotics, automation to shipping logistics, and payment processing to fulfillment.

Bringing Sustainability in the Last Mile Into Focus

E-commerce has helped many to navigate the pandemic, from online shopping to food delivery. While the e-commerce boom has profoundly benefitted the industry, the increased volumes in the last mile is also a concern due to many factors such as packaging wastage, capacity constraints and more. In order to combat this problem, many brands have already made efforts to reduce their carbon footprint by optimizing delivery options and last-mile delivery to minimize environmental harm. Sustainability is now one of the fastest growing trends in the e-commerce industry, with customer preferences also leaning towards sustainable and sometimes even slower delivery solutions in support of the environmental movement.

In one of the panels, Veena Harbaugh, Director of Sustainability at Sendle, spoke about sustainability in the last mile. Sendle’s goal is to get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. However, since they rely on carriers to operate, their carrier services need to optimize for sustainable operating models and still remain trackable to make this happen. Achieving net-zero emissions means that some greenhouse gasses are still released into the atmosphere, but these are offset by removing an equivalent amount of greenhouse gasses from our atmosphere and storing it permanently in soil, plants, or materials. Though it sounds nearly impossible, a study has found that available technologies could in fact allow the world to achieve nationwide net-zero emissions by 2050. 

The Importance of End-to-end Supply Chain Visibility 

Supply chain visibility enables businesses to improve their customer service and cost controls through management of inventory in motion, proactive status updates, limiting disruptions and risk mitigation. As a result, the supply chain will become stronger and more agile in the process of achieving good visibility. Through the implementation of new technologies, companies are able to track quality issues more efficiently, identify new suppliers that can offer higher quality levels and more. It also empowers businesses to use more actionable data insights, automation, and other tools to make better decisions, forecast demand more accurately, and prepare for unexpected events throughout the volatile supply chain.

Swedish multinational clothing company, H&M, was one of the companies that presented on the supply chain visibility panel. Their representative speaker, Michaela Wallin, Competence Lead in Customer Fulfillment of Americas, shared some insights on identifiers versus data carriers, interaction between surrounding systems such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), WMS (Warehouse Management System) and more. An important highlight of their session included a deep dive into their end-to-end supply chain traceability system which tracked their materials and products from the farming and feedstock stage to the recycle and resell stage. These events are also recorded in H&M’s EPCIS (Electronic Product Code Information Services) Event Repository where it receives, stores and then exposes event data to services, applications and data platforms for various use cases. This shows that they place importance on improving and strengthening the supply chain by making data readily available to all stakeholders, including the end-customer.

Scalability Through Digital Transformation 

David Strobelt, EVP/Senior Technology Adviser and Supply Chain Officer at Saadia Group, spoke about digital scalability in his keynote session. An insightful takeaway was their key investments in their technology stack that they used to develop the business and aid in scalability to adapt to market demand. For example, one of the challenges Saadia Group faced was the lack of familiarity and talent available to support old systems. This led them to invest in federated omni-channel OMS (Order Management System), WMS, EDI (Electronic Data Interface) and integration tools which enabled them to yield better profit margins, highly effective employees and more-satisfied customers. 

Scaling is about efficiency and sustainability, both of which increasingly depend on certain crucial technologies. Companies that employ the right technology tools get more work done in less time. Parcel Perform believes in adapting to these new technologies with a focus on the right, standardized and actionable data fully integrated across systems in mind. 

Leveraging Your Delivery Journey to Elevate Your Customer Experience

A report showed that customer experience has become so crucial that researchers predict it will overtake price and product as the top competitive differentiator. Parcel Perform’s Founder and CCO, Dana von der Heide, supported this stand in her session where she shared about how businesses can elevate delivery experience through gaining last mile visibility, and how leading brands are optimizing the delivery journey to meet rising customer expectations. In her presentation, she revealed that consumers often expect not just free, but also fast (same day or overnight) delivery options to choose from. This has led shippers to diversify their portfolio of last mile providers, which is a key trend and challenge of the post-2021 peak season. 

With Parcel Perform’s extensive network of more than 800 carriers, we can help businesses to streamline the collection and standardization of their delivery data by integrating seamlessly with any service, tool or platform that their company uses. This will enable companies to focus on other important tasks like improving their customer experience by optimizing post-checkout strategies.

Technology as the Backbone of E-commerce

The e-commerce industry originated from technology and it continues to evolve with new advancements everyday. Through the sessions by our industry leaders, we understand the need to place importance on adopting these technological changes and utilizing them to build and grow businesses. Technology trends will continue to shape e-commerce and businesses need to be equipped with the proper tools to adapt to the ever-changing industry. 

Keep a keen eye on our LinkedIn page and Blog and stay tuned for our updates on the upcoming events that we will be attending. 

Ecommerce Operations Technology Summit 2022

12 - 13 April 2022

Orlando, Florida, United States of America