Millennial-izing your logistics

   The logistics staff that you hire today for your business, whether you’re a shipper, transportation intermediary or freight carrier, will mostly come from the millennial generation. 
   While it’s difficult to group people together—the 80 million or so millennials would be those individuals who entered the workforce after 2000—it’s often the best way to identify overarching characteristics about the way a certain generation lives, thinks and interacts with one another.
   A U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation report identified millennials this way: “Most consistent is that this generation is technically savvy, almost as if it has a digital sixth sense. A wired, connected world is all that millennials have ever known.”
   Many of these young people, for example, have never picked up a printed publication, opting to read their news online. And forget about picking up the phone to talk so someone—they would rather text each other, even if they’re in the same room.
   This is not meant as a criticism, because every generation has its many positive attributes, including the millennials, who tend to look for job satisfaction rather than corporate ladder-climbing, believe in collaborative efforts, and seek to improve society. 
   These are the individuals that are gradually filling out your workforce and with their technological prowess will likely prove beneficial to any future logistics operation.
   American Shipper has repeatedly found in its studies of technology usage that companies continue to struggle with letting go of manual-based, data-driven tasks in favor of automation. Many internal systems, supported by archaic and siloed IT architecture, are operating on borrowed time. 
   However, we have this paradox in the logistics industry that companies are wanting more control over their supply chains, all the way back to sourcing. Sorting and understanding how to manage data—and lots of it, hence all the chatter about “Big Data”—will be key to future success. All this means is that companies will need plenty of people with the proper IT and relationship skills for their logistics operations, and millennials fit the bill.
   While we’re not saying phone calls and face-to-face encounters with colleagues and customers will, or should, disappear from how companies manage their logistics operations and services, the reality is that more and more of these activities will continue to be performed in an automated fashion. It’s often better to accept a new reality, embrace it and make it work to your advantage—and in the case of logistics, generating profits through smooth-operating supply chains is better than beating a dead horse. Embracing millennials and their connected, collaborative ways is the path forward.

This editorial was published in the May 2015 issue of American Shipper.