New year, new ways to support businesses

With a new year on the horizon, I’ve got to thinking about how much DP World has changed this year and what we are now able to offer as a business, which we were not capable of 12 months ago.

It’s a mindset that has been influenced by some recent work we have doing for a customer in Romania, which represents what we can now make possible at the start of a cargo’s journey. Further, a recent visit my teams paid to a Dell technology warehouse in The Netherlands demonstrates what we can now make possible at the end of a cargo’s journey too.

In Romania, our DP World Constanta team have been working with agribusiness, Al Dahra, which faced historical logistical challenges due to the location of one of its hay processing sites – an issue which has now been exacerbated by rising costs and supply chain disruptions.

We changed what’s possible for them by implementing barge services that provide greater capacity and flexibility on the frequency of services, and also resulted in the CO2 emissions being reduced by 300 tons since the switch was made.

Sustaining this kind of customised support for customers is largely dependent on physical trade infrastructure – something which DP World is also diversifying through strategic acquisition and modernisation.

The facility in The Netherlands I referred to earlier, meanwhile, is managed by syncreon – the integrated logistics experts that DP World joined forces with earlier this year. My colleagues who visited it were hugely impressed by how the warehouse is perfectly positioned to store Dell’s products once they’re shipped in and is also equipped to fulfil customer deliveries.

However, it is the additional services syncreon provide to Dell and its customers, which captured my team’s imagination. The warehouse sits as a major link in Dell’s European supply chains, stockpiling thousands of products and accessories, while boasting connections to nearby ports, rail and truck services. Dell’s stockists and customers can have their orders tailored and dispatched quickly and efficiently as a result and can also have certain models built on-site.

Now, warehousing might not be everyone’s idea of a thrill – but when they’re as smart as this, they get people such as myself very excited indeed. You see, smart logistic solutions like this that encompass the entire supply chain, end-to-end, are what we’re aspiring to achieve throughout DP World’s European and global remit. Replicated on a large scale, this integrated model can keep trade moving – from manufacturer to customer doorstep.

Looking back on the past tumultuous year, I think it’s safe to say that our customers want this too. Need it, even.

To this day, we are still plagued by the aftermath of Covid-19 and the knock-on effects of a world locked down for months on end. War in Ukraine continues to disrupt the supply of vital agricultural goods and construction materials – and all this is combining to escalate the cost-of-living crisis in a way that threatens the welfare of millions worldwide. What people, governments and businesses deserve right now is stability – and it is private sector leaders like my company that have the power to grant them that wish.

I’ll admit that alone we may not be able to fix the world’s problems. But we can inspire change through our actions and support industry peers to evolve in a way that will spark positive change. Collectively, supply chain operators and logisticians can lay the groundwork for global recovery and stability.

This thinking is what set us on our current business transformation: a mission to become a complete end-to-end logistics specialist. We have the global reach already; even more so now thanks to our acquisitions of Imperial Logistics and syncreon. But to achieve our goal we must link all our assets together. Because synchronicity on this scale will give our supply chains visibility and resilience on a scale never seen before.

We are committed to implementing more solutions to create greater connectivity along our supply chains. Rather than simply connecting A to B, we are going to diversify the infrastructure and routes to market between that start and finish point, minimising bottlenecks as we go.

Just this month, for example, my teams at P&O Ferrymasters launched a direct service between Finland and the UK, a shortsea offering that sits alongside existing routes comprising trucking, rail and barge. The purpose of this is to give customers more cost-effective options, minimising the possibility of delays by creating more trade routes for them. The fact that this shortsea route is a low-carbon option is an additional perk.

Another key component to our end-to-end strategy is digitalisation. Much of the supply chain industry continues to run on analogue systems, which take time to fulfil and carry a high margin of error – a cause of avoidable delays and costs. However, many of the operations we conduct in our industry, especially within our ports, are predictable – and can therefore be automated.

DP World in Antwerp celebrated the arrival of some automated stacking cranes earlier this month; autonomous vehicles that can stack more shipping crates higher and closer together, using space effectively and doing the job faster than traditional methods. This saves a huge amount of time – and time is money. Further, automated machinery gives us the power to create digital maps of our ports and monitor the flow of goods within them in real time. This means we can identify or even predict delays before they happen and offer everyone in the supply chain end-to-end visibility.

We’re already changing as a business to better support our customers worldwide – and our subsidiaries are both inspiring and empowering us on this transformational journey. Like them, I hope the bigger and better changes we’ll embark on in the new year inspire others too and create some stability during these difficult times.