Will Technology Destroy Logistics Companies?

[jfkbengals]

(12-19-2017, 10:40 PM)BFritz21 Wrote: I've been worried for a long time about technology destroying jobs and putting a lot of people out of business, and a good friend of mine owns a logistics company in the Greater Cincinnati area (Lighthouse Transportation Services), and I've been wondering if it's a sustainable business forever or if technology will destroy it.

Companies need goods and whatever shipped, so they contact Lighthouse and my friend (and the people that work for him) set it up, and they're doing very well, but how long before a company just pulls out a cell phone, goes into an ap, types in "I need this delivered from here to here," and it goes out to all truckers who can just click "ok" and they have the job?

I guess one could argue that you can't just trust a truck driver on an ap when he could actually be finishing one delivery, get delayed, and not even get to the one that he agreed to on the ap for a day or even a few hours (which can be costly), or that the entire process is just quicker and cleaner with a logistic company, but will it always be that way?

I guess it's more cost-efficient than going through the process of hiring and paying people more than the logistics company to do it.

Will logistic companies be around forever?

What you're proposing can only be done with LTL services. 

Oversized loads are a completely different animal.

For example, my company manufactures industrial material handling equipment.  We have a crane heading to Arizona that, after disassembly, will require 5 loads.  4 of the loads will only need 5 days to get there, even though 2 of them will be roughly 100 feet in length each.  The trolley is both oversize and overweight, requiring 14 days to make the journey.  Local restrictions and regulations along the way require different things along the way.  Permits are required everywhere, but some places will have prohibitions on the route or times of travel.  Some places will require police escort.

Those types of things will never be able to be automated.  They need the human outreach to coordinate among all of the localities, etc.