One of the congress thematic sessions was devoted to professional applications of mobile technologies in logistics and trade – technologies that not only support warehouse processes, serve to monitor vehicle traffic, and appear in electronic data interchange, but also increasingly act as an interactive communication tool for a brand owner (manufacturer or distributor) with a consumer interested in accessing information and services related to a specific product or commodity.– The mobile phone and mobile technologies, not only due to their capabilities but also their ubiquity and accessibility, are becoming an icon of current culture. The number of portable devices, which includes not only phones but all mobile devices, is constantly growing – says Jacek Pucher from the Institute of Logistics and Warehousing. – According to data from the International Telecommunication Union, in 2010 as much as 74% of the world’s population will be equipped with a “mobile phone”.
The number of diverse applications for mobile devices is also growing:
– increasing average duration of calls (in Poland it is 26 minutes per day)
– thousands of sent and received SMS messages (about 2500 per year per Polish GSM user)
– huge amounts of data transmitted thanks to the development of the mobile Internet.
One of the most widely known mobile solutions in logistics is the use of portable terminals that support warehouse operations, used for identifying goods and processing data in the warehouse system. The use of such terminals, along with the installation of an internal wireless communication network, allows warehouse staff to more easily locate stored goods, provides immediate access to information about goods, and additionally, thanks to being equipped with specialized software, can support various warehouse operations related to, among other things, receiving and issuing goods, inventory, location, blocking storage space, or order picking.
More about mobile technologies in logistics and trade in the latest issue of Logistics Magazine.