Metro continues its digital transformation journey

While the freight and logistics sector may be accused of lagging other industries, in developing its digital capability, Metro continues to develop service capability that goes beyond offering just supply-chain visibility.

The investments we’ve made in systems and cloud networks create real-time dashboards that show shippers what’s happening in their supply chain network, with rich data that can be adapted and interrogated to show which supply chain lever to pull next.

Our immediate objective is getting more and more data digitised, to provide shippers with visualisation of their data, so they can analyse it and we can automate more operations, so that people can focus on adding value to the process.

Control, creativity, bespoke solutions and customer dialogue are at the core of our digital evolution and developments. We are investing heavily to ensure that we remain at the cutting edge of the industry and deliver beyond your expectations across all areas and functions within the business. It is relentless and an area that Metro are passionate about to ensure that we have a solid platform that performs for the next decade and beyond.

Metro’s new operations platform, which is powered by CargoWise, has been implemented in our customs brokerage and airfreight areas as well as our Elite brand, all of which are benefiting from workflow automation, which reduce errors and improve efficiencies.  

Implementation will continue throughout the summer of 2023, when sea imports and export customer services will transition, followed by customer specific teams to complete the rollout by October. This has been part of a 30 month journey which now has the end in sight, although it will not finish once the current destination is reached. Digital solutions and design never stand still.

Customers may see some slightly different documentation being produced as we migrate and they will be able to access our new track and trace application, with a notification engine, the DC Manager app, and more due to appear soon.

Conceived, created and supported by our internal technical solutions team, Metro’s bespoke supply chain management platform, MVT, is moving to version 4, to leverage the additional end-to-end visibility of shipments the CargoWise product provides and add more capability to our ECO product.  

Thanks to our business process solutions teams in the UK and India, no process has been left behind, as we strive for simplification and automation.  

These significant developments in digitisation, processes and data transparency is optimising our operations and commercial functions, which means they can become even more customer focused and available to serve.

The pandemic demonstrated the critical importance of effective supply chain visibility and digitising supply-chain operations, to understand what was happening, maintain control and initiate change.

We already embrace real-time carrier inputs and geo-fencing in enhancing data integrity and supply chain visibility, and look forward to adding more functionality as carriers add sensors to their container fleets, and AI interprets a rapidly changing environment.

We have many initiatives that have been and are being rolled out to our customers, and new concepts in design stage so there is much much more to come.

The Metro board continues to invest in internally developed and externally acquired innovation in 2023-2024, which promises to be an exciting period for the Technical Solutions Team and business as a whole. EMAIL Simon George, Technical Solutions Director, to learn more.