Digital transformation for cold chain management in freight forwarding industry

During the pandemic, the attention and demand for cold chain increased owing to considerable use of low-temperature logistics in transporting perishable goods and vaccines. To ensure the shipping performance for reduced damage, logistics companies are required to track continually and repetitively the status of shipments daily. However, typing various air waybills for searching the shipping status is a cause of frequent errors. Also, tracking the shipping status is labor-intensive, resource intensive, inefficient and repetitive. Moreover, repetitive tasks result in low employee satisfaction. Therefore, robotic process automation (RPA) applications have gained the attention of practitioners in the cold chain logistics industry. This study contributes to (i) determining possible areas requiring automation through the workflow study on cold chain logistics and (ii) streamlining the operation by the develop a robotic process automation bots. A case study tested and evaluated the performance of two unattended RPA bots applied in a freight forwarder company to check shipment status and temperature conditions. The results determined that implementing RPA in the workflow reduces significant data processing time. With the implementation of proposed RPA bots, the company can better comprehend its shipping performance of logistics and can get an immediate notification from RPA bots when an abnormal situation occurs with regard to a shipment.