CIO 100: Mainfreight

GLOBAL LOGISTICS PROVIDER Mainfreight will see its ICT budget, team and projects increase in tandem this year.

Kevin Drinkwater, Mainfreight CIO, says the 78-member ICT team will work on projects that are a continuation from initiatives launched in 2015, all the way to new systems for both local and offshore operations.

Drinkwater heads a global team, with 25 of its members based in New Zealand and 53 in Mainfreight’s overseas offices.

The company is in the midst of rolling out ‘Intelligent Assets’, which is around deploying advancements that will keep the company on a “competitive edge with technology to and beyond 2020”.

One of its thrusts is to provide the internal team, customers and business partners with a more targeted set of data.

Customers, for instance, will set their own criteria as to what is most important to them, define what an exception is and how they would like them displayed on their digital interfaces connecting with Mainfreight.

Drinkwater says the first phase of this project is the biggest improvement ICT delivered to the organisation in the past year.

The team will continue to deploy the second phase of Intelligent Assets, where they will aggregate data from multiple internal and external sources to give customers an insight into their supply chain that they have not been able to have previously.

They will also work on the continuation of Mainstreet domestic freight system for NZ and Australia, customer systems for Air and Ocean Services and a new domestic system for Europe.

Drinkwater says in addition to these projects, Mainfreight will also invest in technologies around business intelligence and analytics, mobile technologies, customer experience, supply chain and content management.

Drinkwater lists agility/speed of deployment and leading disruptive technology-enabled change as the top challenges he and his team across the globe will face in upcoming months.