Lorena Quidiello, Coordinator of the International, Administration, Logistics and Trade Area of Bureau Veritas Training .
The digital revolution is influencing current business models and opportunities, allowing the development of new practices that take advantage of information technologies to develop new modes of collaboration (B2B, C2C, B2C) and achieve the expected benefits or objectives.
Surely at some point you have heard of initiatives such as crowdfunding , which seeks to take advantage of the financial resources of a large number of individuals to finance projects, or crowd innovation , through which attempts are made to take advantage of the intellectual resources of people for the purpose of innovation.
These initiatives, which we know as crowd-sourced line data practices , are impacting business organizations and while they are generating great value for companies and their customers, they can also constitute real threats to some more traditional businesses.
The benefits, which are generally associated with these emerging initiatives or business models, are related to the cost or time savings that can be achieved to reach the desired result and also to the higher level of efficiency that can be achieved.
In this same line of crowd trends , the idea of taking advantage of people's resources to provide logistics services has emerged in recent years and this is when we talk about initiatives linked to crowd logistics or collective logistics .
We would be talking about an outsourcing of logistics services to an indefinite multitude of external actors, who participate voluntarily in the initiative and receive compensation for it.
The management of this innovative technique is carried out using mobile applications and virtual platforms , which allow the coordination of demand and supply of logistics services.
Various crowd-sourced logistics initiatives have been developed around the world, for example, using private garages as warehouses for goods or personal vehicles to transport goods or make deliveries locally, nationally and even internationally.
The added value propositions that can be generated by these innovative techniques depend on the type of logistics service offered, the different needs that are to be satisfied or the type of product that is to be distributed and could be related, for example, to an improvement in the proximity , accessibility or adaptability of the logistics service .