INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS STICHT, CO-FOUNDER AND MANAGING DIRECTOR AT ACS LOGISTICS
Thomas Sticht is a freight forwarding and logistics native who started his carreer in 1994. He has gone through all major disciplines of international forwarding and is recognized as a performing professional for Air- and Ocean Freight with a strong focus on technology- and process driven supply chain solutions development for global businesses. After holding various positions as a Director for Air Freight, Customer Solutions Development and Global Business Process Optimiziation Thomas has started his own business in 2011 together with his two managing partners by founding ACS Logistics Austria – a fully independent LSP with the clear Vision to become Austria’s leading quality and most digital LSP for overseas logistics.
What is your answer to the latest trend “Digital Forwarding”?
It’s indeed a trend driven by very less highly capitalized tech companies that made a kind of reverse engineering of the typical freight forwarders business model. Typically, a technology driven backend as basis and a logistics platform as frontend to generate higher customer satisfaction and create solid freight volumes. This semt to solve all those many problems of lack of transparency, communication, collaboration, user friendly platforms, etc. the logistics industry got more and more confronted with over the past decade. In my point of view technology is not the ultimate solution but it’s most probably the ultimate enabler for our industry to perform better. At ACS Logistics we have developed a technology- and process-driven business model that is built on expert teams of logistics and freight management. We call it “Smart Forwarding” focusing a new generation of logistics professionals who simply use technology to enrich service levels towards our customers. But key element is and remains to be the human experts at ACS Logistics who are capable to design and execute premium customs logistics solutions. To answer in short: Digitization of business models and processes nowadays is mandatory to succeed and going next level, but the real value and challenge is to keep the right balance between human- and technology interaction as well as between human and artificial intelligence.
What is the impact of digitalization on the freight forwarding industry?
First of all, I think it’s important to respect digitaliziation as the big thing that it is – an industrial revolution with a multitude of impacts but, more importantly, uncountable new chances. With regards to our industry, it enables greater transparency, can reduce complexity in supply chains and provide much better control for the planning process through data management, and allows to automate routines to take operational behaviors of organizations to the next level. However, it also requires a new and fully updated mindset of personalities who can perform process thinking but also handle different applications, software, and tools to deliver better solutions for our customers. At ACS Logistics, we do have this thinking and doing anchored in our DNA since day one, which ensures that we do have the necessary mindset in place from a total organization point of view. That helps us and our experts to free up from routine working behaviors and to focus and invest much more time in planning and designing customized solutions. So like in most other industries, there’s no way not to say “yes” to digitalization to be ready for today’s and future challenges. But it has to start with changing mindset – that takes time, effort and a lot of empathy, and even more patience, and there’s absolutely no alternative for companies that intend to keep growing successfully.
How much do technologies play a leading role in the development of freight forwarders?
Talking about technologies in global freight forwarding, we actually mainly consider software, applications, platforms, data mining/management. Over the past 10 years, we have witnessed tremendous developments in this field, including global interconnectivity of systems, widespread high-speed connections, faster computing power, and the indispensable role of data analysis in everyday work life, which have greatly transformed things. It’s not just the software itself but also the way of purchasing, maintaining, supporting, developing, and deploying that has opened so many new doors and brought extreme flexibility and agility to how a company can build it’s Tech Stack. With that said, it’s important to understand that the wide range of new tools and applications brings in a new level of complexity for companies taking strategic decisions for that part of organizational development. Often it is tempting to say buy a software and many problems will be solved. But in reality, it’s not the software parts but in fact the change process within the organization, integrating the software and having up-to-date most accurate data at the right time. Since day one, we have had a clear vision and a strict plan of developing our technology landscape along with our organization’s mindset. Having best-of-breed software in place implementing our business processes and its continuous development – piece by piece – day by day. Today we are prepared and ready to take the next step, which involves artificial intelligence, big data, and business process automation.
ACS Logistics, founded in 2011 as an efficient Austrian transportation and logistics company, is a flexible full-service provider specializing in custom-tailored logistics solutions for air freight, sea freight, and overland transportation as well as integrated logistics. ACS Logistics has won Austria’s most prestigious business awards in series over the past few years.
www.acslogistics.at/en