The value of stolen cargo from a retailer, either from the warehouse or in transit to a store, drops directly to the shrink line. A major component of loss prevention’s success is low shrink. Learn all you can about cargo theft and how to prevent it.

Some good news is that, according to Sensitech’s SensiGuard Supply Chain Intelligence Cargo Theft Annual Report, overall reported cargo thefts during the first quarter of 2018 declined 22 percent, with a 15 percent drop in dollar value versus the same period in 2017.

Fast forward to today. Trucks have replaced horse-drawn wagons, and today’s cargo theft perpetrators are often part of international crime syndicates. The global economic crisis increased demand for black-market goods. But cargo theft statistics are difficult to track.

The benefit of drone deliveries is that it drastically cuts the cost of labor by reducing the number of vehicles on the roads, and it also has the potential to eliminate the challenges of accessing rural areas or difficult geographical locations, which can add to the cost of shipping.

For thousands of years, deliveries were made either on foot, or with the assistance of a horse or a ship. Then trains, automobiles, and planes came along and radically changed things. In the past 100 years, deliveries were able to be made faster, safer, and more efficiently than at any point in history.

One form of automation has already been implemented in the shipping industry with the use of automated cranes for transferring shipping containers from ship to shore. The future of shipping is heading beyond container handling to using automated vehicles and ships for transporting goods. Apple and Google both have autonomous vehicles in development, and this technology has big implications for the shipping industry.