LOFTWARE
Lofty ambitions
With a move to cloud among many warehousing and supply chain operations ongoing, Loftware is ideally placed to capitalise on this and help resellers within this market to do similar.
It is a time of change in the supply chain, warehousing and logistics sectors. As the global supply chain becomes ever more complex – and with greater amounts of materials and products travelling across the world than ever – there is a need to oversee it more closely than ever. As a result, there is a wave of cloud adoption and automation among businesses in the sector, according to Paul Vogt, VP partner strategies at Loftware. “The supply chain is a physical environment, it’s all about moving physical items across the globe, which is I think why the supply chain has been slower than some other sectors to adopt cloud,” he says. “But now I’m seeing many more companies in the supply chain specifying cloud.” This is backed up by results from Loftware’s recent global survey, which draws on insights from more than 300 labelling, packaging, and supply chain professionals across industries in 55 countries. It found that investing in cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing, AI and IoT solutions is no longer a tactical necessity but an enabler for business growth and agile supply chain operations. “Some of it is about modernisation but regulation is driving it too, and some of that regulation is tied into the sustainability agenda and demand for certain standards on that,” adds Paul. He points again to the results of Loftware’s
survey, which found that 77% of respondents said that they are actively working on projects directly impacted by stricter regulations related to sustainability. “That includes things like reducing fuel, waste, packaging materials, tightening the supply chain to avoid loss and counterfeit,” he says. Paul adds that businesses are looking to solutions such as Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, as they are renowned for being secure. “That old fear of security and data protection issues with cloud is going away and customers see that the advantages are so overwhelming,” he says. “People can work from anywhere and always have full visibility of their supply chain – they can literally tap into what is going on at a supplier in Hong Kong, Havana or Hawaii. That is blowing the minds of our customers, they love it.” Software boost This move to cloud helped boost Loftware during 2023, which in general was a year where the market was still working out the problems from the previous years, even if some were trying to deceive themselves that everything was back to normal, Paul adds. “In the software world we did very well, but our hardware partners and our partners who supply hardware to end users had a really tough year,” he says. “We saw a spike in 2022 in hardware sales when the supply chain had its blip. But last year the supply chain issues seemed to be coming to a resolution and we saw an uptick in software demand. “In 2023, I don’t know whether it was consolidation or customers were reorganising themselves but in general they didn’t buy hardware, but they did buy software. Great for us, bad for hardware providers. But our partners who work directly with end users providing systems were very busy. As a result, we were very busy with a lot of SAP, Oracle Netsuite and Microsoft Dynamics implementations as end users were looking to streamline and improve the processes of supply chain printing.”
Paul Vogt VP partner strategies
loftware.com
Some of it is about “
modernisation but regulation is driving it too, and some of that regulation is tied into the
sustainability agenda and demand for certain standards...
”
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