Geodis Digital Resource “To Reset Supply Chain Industry Fundamentals”
14th November 2018
France-based global supply chain player Geodis says it is looking “to reset the fundamentals of the Supply Chain industry” by investing in its own digital marketplace, which it has called ‘Upply’.
Upply, the digital Supply Chain solution launches internationally with the first set of long awaited features that, it says, promise to bring in more transparency and flexibility to the marketplace. Upply’s launch is part of Geodis’ global digitization strategy: Marie-Christine Lombard (Chairman & CEO Geodis), explains the rationale: “Our global strategy of innovation and digital transformation is twofold: while continuing to digitize our core business and to invest in our strategic assets to enhance both customer experience and productivity, we capitalize on our experience as the pioneer in 4PL to take it one step further and create a true digital market-place, meeting the demands of an increasingly fast-paced Supply Chain market.”
Upply is a double-sided marketplace that caters to everyone dealing with their Supply Chain. The Smart feature dispenses instant freight quotes for up to 100,000 lanes in addition to data-driven market insights. By combining anonymous and encrypted information extracted from the daily marketplace activity with benchmarks from secure partners, the marketplace’s proprietary algorithms reveal market prices and trends at any given time. In a competitive and volatile logistics market, these insights allow users to understand where they can benefit from market conditions, combine modes of transportation and secure capacity.
Geodis veteran Boris Pernet has been named CEO of Upply. “The Supply Chain industry is facing tremendous challenges. These problems highlight the need to reset the fundamentals so that the business potential of every player can be unleashed. Price volatility, information opacity, overbooking, last-minute cancellations, pressure on capacities and underutilization are all market defects that hinder the market’s efficiency and its capacity to meet demand,” he says. “Upply was created to overcome these challenges by combining logistics expertise and data science. Eventually, Upply will be the marketplace for users to make informed decisions and generate fluid exchanges. It is founded on the principles of information transparency, control and flexibility.”
In the next few months, Upply expects to release new features that will enable users to buy and sell freight capacity on multiple modes of transport.