Japan is establishing a nationwide smart logistics platform to collect data about entire delivery processes of selected products from production, transportation, distribution to sales and customers for shared use by producers, logistics operators, regional distributors and retail operators, a bid to hike overall logistics efficiency by 20%.
The selected products will be mainly daily necessities, merchandise items sold at convenience stores and drugstores as well as medical materials, devices and equipment. GPS, RFID labeling, real-time sensing, image recognition and other sensing technologies will used in the data collection under the Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program.
For each selected product, data to be collected include output, inventory, sales volumes and the corresponding customers as well as conditions of transportation such as locations of or other information on ships or trucks. Data will be digitized and visualized for being recorded at the platform and digital data will be processed to become analyzable to allow any interested party to undertake analytics for own commercial purposes. The platform will be responsible for providing processed digital data for open use but will not intervene in competition in analyzing data for value-added application.
Scheduled for completion at the end of March 2023, the platform is expected to particularly help small- to medium-size enterprises upgrade logistics incurred to their business operation, believes Digitimes Research