For Australian retailers expanding into international markets, logistics challenges can cause stress and drive up overheads.
Managing multiple carriers, customs procedures and other logistical challenges across multiple time zones creates an inevitable complexity around knowing what is happening with products in transit. Poor communication and multiple people manually entering data into legacy systems can delay decision-making, which can keep stock from making a launch or promotional program.
Nick Barber, Flexport’s new head of commercial for Asia-Pacific, has relocated from Amsterdam to Singapore to oversee its expansion into Australia and growth across existing markets including Vietnam, Thailand and China.
He says Australian businesses are often well equipped to manage the initial step of getting products into the country, but the tougher task comes when they need to replicate that model internationally.
The complexity of going global
“Getting product to Australia is the easy part. They typically have a financial, operational, or production team based in their offices in Australia or New Zealand who can manage that. What becomes difficult is: How do we scale that internationally? How do we find the right partners to support us?
“We see a lot of Australian brands expanding into North America, the UK, and Europe. We see them facing similar issues that we have seen in our existing customer base that we’ve helped them solve over the years.”
Barber says Australian companies often feel like they are navigating uncharted waters.
“Expansion into new markets raises inevitable and thorny questions: What are the customs codes? What paperwork do I require? What carriers, agents, or brokers should I use?”
The result can be a patchwork of logistics providers, each responsible for one part of the journey.
“I’ve often seen that they cannot necessarily rely on their incumbent Australian logistics partner because they don’t have that global network. They’re relying on several different intermediaries: A shipper’s agent in China, a new trucker collecting product from the factory, maybe a different shipping line taking it to the UK, a different customs clearance procedure when it gets to the UK, and then a different customs import clearance procedure if they also want to ship into the EU.
When visibility isn’t enough
The operational burden becomes particularly acute when information is fragmented.
“What Australian brands find when they’re scaling internationally is that there are multiple vendors involved, and that means they have to send multiple emails, and join multiple video calls at untimely hours with vendors in several different time zones around the world to actually answer the question: Where is my product? Is it going to arrive on time? Am I going to hit my launch or my sale date? Can I get the product into my customers’ hands as promised?”
Barber argues that having access to data is only the beginning. The fundamental question is whether that information supports a decision.
“If you have good, structured data, that gives you that one dynamic source of truth where you can see exactly where everything is happening, rather than it living outdated on a spreadsheet.
“The moment you put data on a spreadsheet, it becomes obsolete because that data piece has ultimately changed somewhere in the world. Something has happened, and you’re relying on a human being to update that spreadsheet.”
That distinction becomes increasingly important as retailers introduce AI into their operations.
“We have been building the technology for 12 years. AI has accelerated this development across the full supply chain. That will help Australian retailers grow in new markets with more confidence and less chaos.”
From predicting problems to solving them
Barber says AI offers a huge opportunity not only to identify a problem during a shipment, but to present solutions to minimise delays.
“The value of AI is not simply that it can identify an emerging problem faster, but that it can use that information to help frame the decisions that follow.
He cites an example where historically you would need to wait for a shipping line or a port to notify Flexport that a container had not been loaded on a vessel as scheduled.
“Using AI, we can now often predict that problem in advance, but predicting is only half the solution; you still need a human to act on it,” he continues. “That is what the AI is doing for us: It notifies us faster, we immediately see space on alternate vessels, reserve this space prior to competition, and give the customer the final decision on proposed options.
The difference, he says, can be measured in hours – which can have significant consequences for retailers operating at speed.
“Five hours can be a lot in retail, especially in e-commerce and fast-moving retail, so Flexport and our AI reduce the time to inform and the time to decide by speeding up the process.”
Reduced labour costs could be another advantage: “We can rationalise up to 70 per cent of a company’s supply chain processes and manual workload, and that might save you a salary of $100,000 in a logistics department where you now only need to employ one person instead of two.”
Connectivity as the next frontier
Barber believes this shift changes the role of supply-chain technology. The objective is to connect disparate data and enable action.
“Australia is geographically distant from everywhere. Leveraging one provider that beats multiple spreadsheets, five different vendor logins, and ungodly hours dialling in to the US East Coast or Northern Europe solves many challenges that distance otherwise presents.”
He sees this as particularly relevant for businesses trying to become more technology-driven without losing sight of the practical realities of running a physical supply chain.
“What we see in Australia is that a lot of businesses want to be fit for the future, or they just want to deploy more AI in their operating model. Meeting customers where they are on this journey is critical, as no one solution cuts across all customers’ needs.”
And while AI is increasingly prominent, Barber says the underlying challenge is broader than the technology itself.
“We are a modern freight forwarder. We have used a decade of these tech developments, which we are now layering AI on top of, and doing that for the real world.
“There is a lot of AI hype out there in the market in every industry, and anyone can actually build AI now. It is more about how you use that to better run your business; how you use AI as an enabler.
“That is where we see ourselves: Helping retailers go from chaos to confidence.”
