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The world is in crisis. The COVID-19 outbreak that began in Wuhan, China, has ballooned into a pandemic that’s devastating countries around the world. Even in regions that have been less directly affected, lives are being upended. The U.S., and indeed global, economy and infrastructure are being tested like never before. While the safety and health of people around the world are paramount right now, there are still critical elements of every-day life that have to be maintained. One of those crucial factors is transportation and shipping.
Our way of life had already been transformed by the advent of ecommerce; most of us are familiar with having everything from books and electronics to our groceries delivered directly to us. Now that COVID-19 has developed into a pandemic, the best general practice we can employ is social distancing. As a result, in North America, online orders for web-only retailers increased 52% compared to 2019 just over the two-week period of March 22 through April 4. In general, revenue for web-only retailers reported that their revenue in the U.S. and Canada was up 30% year-over-year for the period.
Additionally, according to the Emarsys/GoodData tracker, the number of online orders from store-based retailers in the U.S. and Canada were up 56% year over year for the 2 weeks of March 22 through April 4, with online sales for that group growing by 43% compared with March and April of 2019.
What we are seeing right now is drastic increases in web activity and online sales over a very short period of time. This rocks the classic “supply and demand” scales in a dramatic way that is leading many in the shipping and transportation industry to adapt and meet the changing needs of people who are increasingly under shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders.
Delivery is a fantastic way for people to do their part in flattening the curve of the virus and limit our exposure to each other. From everyday tasks like having food or groceries delivered to more important things like the transportation of medical materials, transportation has never been more important to our society. It’s not a simple task to transport lab samples, sensitive equipment and other care items. Shipping such materials requires strict monitoring, which usually means tracking the location of the transport vehicle as well as the contents themselves. This detailed monitoring demands advanced technology and forward-thinking service providers.
LocationSmart is one such company that provides application developers top-performing location-based services to help track vehicles and shipments to ensure deliveries are monitored at each step of the shipping process. By implementing LocationSmart services, developers can utilize tools like Global Site Identification(GSID), IP geolocation and browser-based location. Essentially, these services add location intelligence for devices whether they are connected via cellular or Wi-Fi, GSID can serve as a primary source of location for devices that don’t have GPS capabilities built-in. It can also serve to expedite time to first fix for GPS-enabled devices or act as a back-up location source for such devices.
In today’s world, machine-to-machine communication is sometimes an even more critical factor than the humans involved in transportation, and the transportation process often involves signal loss where GPS is obstructed or otherwise lost. Conserving battery life can also be essential especially when shipments get delayed or rerouted. GSID works as a kind of insurance to keep the monitoring process alive and well by working around the given limitations of GPS technology in these situations.
LocationSmart clients include prominent shipping technology companies that use it’s cloud-based application program interface (API) to improve transportation and logistics visibility. A key benefit of this solution is that it does not require specialized mobile software or applications to be downloaded onto the device, thus providing easy integration and minimizing adverse impact on device performance. Overall, the API platform enables more efficient monitoring and tracking of shipments.
But it’s not just the shipping process that poses a significant challenge to packing monitoring. The storage facilities where packages are housed in route to their final destinations are often constructed in such a way as to block signals from getting in or out of the building. When a shipping company attempts to access location information on a package or device with an obstructed signal, GSID acts as an automatic fall back for giving key device insights.
For one shipping and transportation client, LocationSmart services provide location intelligence to their customers throughout the transit lifecycle from a shipment’s departure to its arrival via the use of GPS-agnostic solution. In essence, “device agnosticism” is the capacity of a computing component to work with various systems without requiring any special adaptations. Such flexibility is a main benefit of the services LocationSmart can unlock for their clients.
And flexibility is key in our modern world. The coronavirus outbreak that continues to affect the U.S. and the world at large has placed new, unforeseen demands on the shipping and transportation industry. Thankfully, there is technology available that is easing some of these challenges.
The world was already well on its way to adopting a primarily ecommerce way of shopping, and the COVID-19 outbreak looks to be ushering that shift into place even sooner than anticipated. With greater shipping traffic, both in number of packages as well as transportation vehicles, tracking and monitoring will become more important than ever before, making services that companies like LocationSmart provide essential to the key players in the shipping and transportation industries.
