The world is becoming more crowded, along with the vital traffic arteries that carry products to factories, warehouses, retail locations, and our doorsteps. The result is that the number of person-hours of traffic delay has tripled in the last forty years in our urban areas. This is not sustainable. But with little relief in sight from strained governmental transportation budgets, manufacturers, shippers, logistics providers, and business owners need a better way to move more goods more quickly over the roads we have today. The inevitable conclusion: we must tackle logistics with the transportation network we have, not the one we would like to have.
Our national transportation infrastructure is mostly a two-dimensional affair—roads on a map. Even if you count planes, their routes are not so different from a network topology point of view. But there’s a third dimension that can make all the difference in transporting things from point A to point B. That third dimension is time, and for those who have the agility, it offers a road less traveled. As anyone ever stuck in rush hour knows, traffic is not evenly distributed around the clock, and therein lies the hack.
We now face an unprecedented number of delivery vehicles on the road, as well as other commercial vehicles that accommodate the just-in-time supply chain and on-demand retail economy. That’s why more businesses are concluding that when it comes to moving goods, the nighttime is the right time. Hence the name for this strategy: dark delivery. This is nothing new, of course. Truckers delivering produce to grocery stores or gasoline to filling stations have long plied the highways overnight.
This is all good, but to make it work well, there are additional challenges that arise from time-shifting the logistics load to off-hours. Drivers still need access to facilities once they reach their destinations in the middle of the night. Distribution centers, warehouses, offices and retail stores that are fully staffed during the day may have only skeleton crews at night and on weekends. Off-hours deliveries often mean that there is no one there to manage access or check credentials in person.
Providing authorization for these deliveries looks like a perfect job description for access control, and it is. However, the technical solutions that work for day-to-day office and commercial applications aren’t always sufficient for the dynamic requirements of logistics. Industrial use cases demand an industrial-strength solution. It must be automated from end to end, take full advantage of mobile digital credentialing, and provide data dividends for operations. And, of course, it must scale to fit the enterprise.
Access Automation
At the heart of the problem is the highly dynamic matrix of people, places, and permissions that changes by the minute as upstream logistics platforms optimize driver schedules, load assignments, and destinations. If these changes are not immediately communicated to the distributed systems managing access to destination facilities, the algorithmic optimizations of even the best routing and scheduling software can be thwarted by physical access issues. As a result, the efficiencies of dark delivery and time-shifting are lost. It benefits no one for deliveries to arrive at their destination, then wait behind a locked door, gate, or loading dock.
Solving this problem would be easier if staffing and personnel assignments were fairly static, but in today’s workplace, they are not. Larger numbers of contract employees, gig workers, and higher post-pandemic turnover rates make access authorization vastly more complicated and dynamic than it was even as recently as five years ago. It’s more than system administrators can manage by hand, with the possibility of errors, omissions, and incorrect upstream information significantly increasing the risk of potentially serious mistakes.
Cloud-based access control and web-based APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allow organizations to automatically assign, modify, and revoke access permissions by facility, individual, time of day, and entry point. A cloud-based platform naturally scales to cover national and international distribution networks, while standards-based open APIs provide a mechanism for integrating workflows from dispatch, personnel, and scheduling systems into access control credential management. This combination is the recipe for simultaneously optimizing logistics schedules, managing a changing workforce, and maintaining security across a widely dispersed set of destinations and personnel.
This solution is further enhanced when cloud-based access control is integrated with video surveillance and visitor management. Staff, contractors, and vendors who visit locations overnight—or anytime—can be monitored in multiple ways not only to ensure their safety but also to support operations analysis.
Mobile Advantage
Mobile digital credentials stored on phones provide tremendous operating leverage versus traditional physical credentials such as keycards, fobs, or transponders. Mobile credentials are a built-in advantage of cloud-based access control because cloud applications can be accessed by any mobile device that has been issued valid logon credentials. All delivery personnel, staff, vendors, and contractors can use their own personal or corporate mobile devices for digital credentials. This approach vastly simplifies credential lifecycle management and drives better compliance due to higher convenience and the ability to instantaneously reach 100% of the target workforce to add, modify, or expire permissions anywhere in the network.
The benefits of incorporating mobility into credential management should be immediately obvious. Eliminating the need for a plethora of physical cards and fobs means that in-person or face-to-face credential distribution is no longer required. The mobile credential management workflow is typically no more complex than downloading a mobile boarding pass for air travel. Digital credentials also eliminate all of the problems associated with lost, stolen, or misplaced physical tokens. These benefits are even more pronounced for 3PL providers because of the number of independent organizations they serve, each of which can issue its own credentials to the same mobile devices, independent of any credentials from unrelated parties. It’s like having Visa and Amex cards in the same wallet.
Finally, mobile credentials also offer a much higher level of cybersecurity than physical credentials. Traditional proximity cards and fobs can be duplicated readily with cheap devices available over the internet, or as a service at stores that offer key duplication services. Smart cards are an improvement over proximity cards from a cyber perspective, but without additional protections (e.g., PIN codes) can still be abused if lost or stolen. Mobile credentials can easily leverage the biometric capabilities of the mobile phone itself and require that each user present a fingerprint or facial scan in order to engage the credential when it is presented for access.
Data Dividends
Enterprise access control systems gather millions of data points. Unfortunately, in large geographically dispersed organizations typical of logistics operations, they are often distributed across multiple systems and therefore cannot be used for global operational analysis. Cloud-based access control platforms centralize all of this information into a single data lake where it can be analyzed by other business systems. These records contain unique profiles of the behavioral patterns and movement of people, vehicles, and objects across multiple facilities, campuses, access types, and times of the day. Many of these data points are an untapped source of insights into logistical efficiency—but only with the right analytics to tease out the beneficial patterns.
Robots Dream of Electric Door Strikes
In closing, we need to look toward the future because any present-day investment in infrastructure or systems must support a vision of how our businesses will operate in the future. Increasing automation is the central narrative of the computer age, and logistics is no exception. What’s made it all the more exciting of late is the real possibility of autonomous vehicles and increasingly agile (and intelligent) robots. They can already bring coffee to your dorm room on many campuses, and they are working on pizza.
One of the things these early experiments in robotic delivery have taught us is that robots are good at a lot of things, but opening doors is not one of them. Doors were made for humans, and the variety of handles, knobs, and entry protocols makes them difficult to navigate for machines. Even smart ones. Unfortunately, opening doors is one of the major skills robots will need if they are to be part of automating package and inventory deliveries. The same problem is on the horizon for autonomous vehicles that need to enter freight yards, shipping depots, and other delivery destinations. As important as automated, mobile, cloud-based access management is for today’s logistics workflows, it’s even more important for ushering in the coming paradigm of autonomous vehicles plus robots that will traverse the last ten yards between truck and threshold.
A Case Study
One well-known retailer has started the journey to 100%t “dark delivery,” meaning drop-offs and pickups occur exclusively while the stores are closed. This retailer must manage a network of hundreds of trucks crisscrossing the country to service its thousands of locations.
Specific drivers may not be matched with trucks until hours before their trips, meaning that a store could get a different delivery driver or team every day. Managing access permissions across thousands of drivers and retail locations had become a major logistical challenge in itself.
The company has adopted cloud-based access control, and it is well into the process of putting the system into its stores and assigning access credentials digitally. If access privileges need to change at the last minute—for example, a driver gets sick, or a vehicle gets delayed in traffic—schedules can be modified via an API.
