F E AT U RE GERARD GEIJTENBEEK, DIRECTOR AT SCANALYTIC AND ROLDO RENT HOLDING and FIDI Board member, describes as an essential technological tool. Meanwhile, good customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, such as Salesforce and HubSpot, are indispensable for those who book and control a significant amount of account business. Then there arethe many homegrown systems tailored by each moving company. At a more basic level, barcoding and now QR coding are being used by the sector, while remote video surveying may be about to revolutionise what is currently a very costly and time-consuming process. All this has helped to create paperless working. However, the extent of this transformation varies around the world and, according to Wiebe van Bockel, CCO of Voerman Group, the industry is only now starting to see signs of rapid change caused by customer demand butit is still happening at too slow a pace. He says: I feel that a lot of people are talking about technology and changes to improve this, but not a lot of companies walk the talk. The process of embedding new systems and applications takes place too slowly. This is a big risk, as it opens the door for outsiders to enter the household goods moving industry. ROB CHIPMAN, CEO OF ASIAN TIGERS MOBILITY HONG KONG ONLINE DISRUPTION Indeed, other players have already started to muscle in on territory held by traditional movers. According to Geijtenbeek, the last large technological revolution to cause serious disruption to the moving industry was the invention of the internet, which he describes as the moment the moving industry lost contact with its customers. He adds: The relocation management companies, procurement specialists and auditors took 42 FF290 pp40-47 Technology 1-Disruptors.indd 42 over all the contacts with main customers. Comparison and lead-generation sites took the customers in the middle and lower segments. According to Chipman, independent price aggregators, such as Acadia and PricePoint, have been one of the biggest disruptors to date, and have commoditised the moving industry. These services gather prices from anyone and everyone and rank them, Chipman explains. This has created tremendous downward pressure on pricing and transparency. They do provide greater transparency which benefits the consumer but, at the same time, they have accelerated the race to the bottom on price. This disruptive technology has benefited the lower-end, low-cost players at the expense of the premium-price, premium-service providers, which would include many FIDI Affiliates. Alvaro Stein, Director of Decapack, agrees that the internet has created great change for the industry, but, for him, one of the first technological disruptors in the supply chain and moving industries was the introduction of standard shipping containers which are still in use today followed by email. He describes the moving and supply chain industries as fragmented, comprised of thousands of small providers spread around the globe. The biggest multinational ones may be more advanced, but the sector will not achieve full potential unless some basic technology standards are widely adopted, says Stein. This is a difficult challenge for most small to mediumsized moving companies, which have limited resources and little access to knowledge. And if industries dont innovate? Amazon will, WWW. F I D I . OR G 13/03/2019 11:55