At the 48th annual South Carolina International Trade Conference, Narin Phol, regional managing director of Maersk North America, spoke on the panel “Customer Strategy Post Pandemic”.
He focused on the importance of supply chain resilience, developing technology solutions as well as decarbonisation.
We have seen that the post-covid era has created many problems in the process of setting up supply chains. In addition, regional conflicts, labor disputes, congestion at ports and land, create potential obstacles.
“To solve these customer challenges, we focused on helping customers find end-to-end solutions such as off-dock depots for storage, warehousing and transload facilities (into domestic trailers). Equally important, we invested in landside logistics capabilities to provide the end-to-end solutions to North American customers,” said Phol.
Furthermore, Phol highlighted that the pandemic has accelerated and magnified the challenges that already existed in data visibility. Technology can provide an important solution to such issues, so that supply chains can be better designed, according to Maersk’s director, such as the digitalisation in the supply chain.
For example, a single container being transported can require up to 100 document exchanges per trip, significantly increasing transport costs with many manual errors potentially delaying the shipment.
Phol went on to focus on the need of reducing the environmental impact of supply chains, while Maersk has already ordered 19 vessels that will use green methanol for its global fleet and has purchased over 400 electric trucks for North America amongst other sustainability initiatives.
