From Supply Chain Digital magazine

Leading logistics company, DHL is no stranger to digital transformation, as it begins its investment into the automation of admin and shipping processes.

Coinciding with recent plans announced to spend US$2.2bn on digitalisation by 2025, DHL has begun a joint collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to provide more transparency and better customer experience in relation to its administrative and shipping processes.

During its “Strategy 2025” presentation in Frankfurt, Frank Appel, CEO of Deutsche Post DHL Group commented “Deutsche Post DHL Group has never been in better shape. We are convinced that future growth will come from a consistent focus on our profitable core logistics businesses - and digitalisation will become the greatest lever. We don’t need to reinvent ourselves. We will digitalise ourselves.”

As part of the collaboration, the two organisations have been working to deploy a blockchain solution that supports logistics payment processing. The solution aims to offer a more robust alternative to back-end processes to reduce errors and tedious tasks.

DHL intends to hold a leading position when it comes to the application of blockchain technology believing it has significant potential in the industry. 

"Blockchain and other innovative technologies can be seen as key differentiators in removing significant layers of complexity from global supply chains," said Eugenius Otte, Head of Product Management, DHL Global Forwarding, Netherlands. "We are extremely excited to work with HPE, a long-standing customer, on this joint venture with the goal of delivering significant service enhancements, productivity improvements and savings in the supply chain."

The solution links multiple entities of HPE and DHL for one-off order management, aiming to address pain points in the approval process by making use of the inherent functionality of a distributed ledger to simplify the process.

"Based on the initial results, HPE has observed a number of inherent benefits, including 100% invoice accuracy and paid on agreed terms, less days payment aging, and little to no manual intervention," according to Kim Masone, HPE Vice President, Global Logistics.