The role of digitalization in logistics and manufacturing
From 2019 to 2024, the national project “Digital Economy” is being implemented with the objective of digitalization – the introduction of modern digital and information and communication technologies into the economy.
The main technologies of digitalisation of the economy include:
– Big data – a socio-economic phenomenon that involves the fact that new technological capabilities have emerged to analyse vast amounts of data;
– Internet of Things – the concept of a data network between objects equipped with built-in tools and technologies for interacting with each other or with the external environment;
– blockchain – a continuous, sequential chain of blocks containing information built according to certain rules. Blockchain technology ensures the security of anonymous cryptocurrency transactions;
– intelligent information technology capable of processing various data using artificial intelligence algorithms. With IIT, situations that could only be handled by human intelligence are formulated and managed. Thanks to IIT, it is now possible to convert these situations into formal systems or calculations and automate their processing.
It is usual now to be able to submit documents online. In a matter of seconds, a traffic accident can be processed from a phone. Digitalisation is reducing the consumption of paper for documentation, especially in urban development. It takes about 13 thousand packages of paper and around 6.5 million roubles to prepare the documentation for one new building under renovation. Now, half of the documents are entered into the electronic document flow, which also allows you to speed up all the necessary stages of approval.
At the same time, the task of introducing digital technology has become more complicated due to the withdrawal of foreign suppliers from Russia. Russian representatives of the IT industry have an opportunity to engage in import substitution, as demand continues to grow and exceeds the number of offers.
Entrepreneurs are taking a responsible approach to choosing the type of IT activity and planning their budget. In this regard, projects that will pay off in the initial phase, such as operations research, are in high demand. Such a study can optimise the logistics and operational processes through mathematical modelling, enabling the best solution to be found in the shortest possible time. Research also makes it possible to trace the order of the computer’s computational processes, i.e. to understand how it arrived at a particular solution.
Nowadays, thanks to GPS, vehicle traffic can be tracked. This makes it possible to optimise routes based on traffic congestion and allows you to track vehicles in real time or view their travel history. You can even find out the average speed of the vehicle.
Another interesting technology is the digital assistant for industrial boiler control. It is built into organisations’ systems, analyses various indicators that are set to it, and optimises the management of industrial boilers and reduces the percentage of gas consumption.
Where do you start when designing an IT project?
Firstly, you need to decide what process to improve.
To do this, you need to go through a series of agreements with those involved in the project, to determine the economic feasibility of the solution developed.
Secondly, it is necessary to understand how the developed IT solution will affect the process to be improved.
For example, an organization in delivery service wants to optimize its work by mathematical analysis so that the couriers won’t be more than 5 minutes late. This creates the problem of estimating the route time from pickup to delivery, taking into account the mode of transport (car, underground, bike) and the profile, as well as the changing conditions on the road.
Then there is a suggestion on how to solve the problem. To save the company’s financial resources, testing is necessary.
The demand for import substitution
Now the Russian IT-market continues to need import substitution and new domestic solutions. This applies primarily to mathematical tasks in logistics and production, where many processes still need to be automated and it is difficult to cope manually with the existing volume of tasks.