COVID-19 has significantly impacted the freight & logistics security industry. Security personnel are playing larger roles in securing our supply chains, whether it be ensuring authorised access, improving processes, or supporting day-to-day operations.
Last month, Certis Security Australia hosted a freight & logistics roundtable, bringing together leaders from the industry to discuss issues faced today, including how organisations continued to grapple with rising costs, labour shortages and compounding demand.
As part of the roundtable discussion, which brought together Erin Dale (Assistant Commissioner East at Australian Border Force), Paul Zalai (Director at Freight Trade Alliance) and other industry leaders, we discussed how organisations can tackle these significant challenges.
In recent months, we experienced a perfect storm of rising costs, labour shortages and increased demand that has impacted several industries — an issue not unique to just the security sector, Businesses can look towards investing more into additional equipment, resources and/or processes that will, for example, address labour shortages. However, companies are unlikely to make these hefty investments without proof of a clear commercial advantage. As such, organisations must obtain the most out of their existing resources and infrastructure while integrating technology and data to augment their workforce.
There are avenues the freight & logistics industry can and should consider.
Business Process Re-engineering of Operations (BPRO®) to improve safety and efficiency
Certis Security Australia’s BPRO® framework helps customers manage change and disruption effectively. In the freight & logistics sector, we’re already doing this with national utility companies and large open precincts where physical security needs to correlate with technology.
With some of our customers, we’ve applied our BPRO® framework to help reduce physical resources while maintaining operational efficiency. For example, we partnered with a bonded warehouse facility in Sydney, and while they had a few initiatives in place to secure and manage their facility, they operated in silo. Certis Security Australia designed a solution that would:
- Integrate their security systems into one platform for enhanced situational awareness
- Automated capturing of crucial information, including license plate data, container numbers and driver IDs, as well as a live record of who, what, how and when
- Allow zero-contact, facial recognition-based access to truck drivers, validated against a licence, to grant access at any time of the day, reducing the need for 24/7 presence at entry/exit points
Getting the most from data
The use of data provides a massive opportunity for the security industry. The pandemic rapidly accelerated digital transformation across all businesses, meaning organisations have more data than ever. Getting the most out of this data will enable businesses to work smarter, not harder—which also helps to address challenges like rising costs and labour shortages.
The key to getting the most from business data is ensuring the infrastructure is in place to glean insights. In many cases, various technologies operate independently, which means that data sits in different places, making it impossible to obtain a full picture. Having the right infrastructure in place also helps to address two of the biggest challenges with data:
- Big data. Australia generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day, so there’s simply too much data to manually process and glean insights from. If organisations aren’t introducing technology to help with this process, they’re rendering much of what they collect useless, which ultimately becomes a liability for these organisations due to data privacy and protection legislation
- Catching critical alerts. There is a fear that relying on technology will lead to critical alerts being missed. However, AI systems are forever learning and will continue to improve and develop in accuracy as they are used, and more data is collected.
By implementing modern technologies and infrastructure to help manage and glean real-time insights from data, organisations have the potential to revolutionise their entire approach to security. For example, real-time insights may enable organisations to predict issues or incidents, allowing preventative measures put in place and become more proactive in their overall approach to security.
Whilst many challenges facing the freight & logistics industry today are also being faced in other industries, the spotlight is shone on security seems stronger because of its role in society and the level of industry compliance required. As such, events such as the Certis Security Australia roundtable unlocks the best industry ideas from industry leaders giving rise of solutions to tackle evolving challenges.
For more information on how we can help you, please get in touch with Steve McSweeney – steve_mcsweeney@certisgroup.com.
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