Logistics industry falls short in Digital Leaders study

The study, which ranks companies for their digital maturity, found that UPS (UK) was the most digitally enabled in the sector, but it still didn’t make the list of companies in the UK’s Top-Ten Digital Leaders. The list was largely dominated by the UK operations of retailers (Amazon, ASOS, AO.com, Argos and Tesco), who took the top five spots.

The study also identified the Telecoms sector as the UK and Global Digital Leader, with EE (ranked 7) and O2 (ranked 8) also appearing in the top ten ranking.

Digital Leaders Study 2019, published by management and technology consultancy, BearingPoint, analyses 593 companies across eight countries (72 companies spanning ten different industry sectors in the UK) – revealing the UK’s digital maturity, and each firms’ digital presence and areas for development. The research is based on more than 250 best practice criteria in six digital dimensions – digital marketing, digital product experience, e-commerce, e-CRM, mobile and social media.

John Lockton, Partner at BearingPoint said: “The logistics industry should be a digital leader in terms of optimising opportunity, but it has performed poorly compared to the other industry sectors. The UK operations of logistics giants - UPS, FedEx, and DPD were predictably the most digitally developed of the firms scoring consistently across the dimensions aside from digital marketing. This shows that whilst there is room for improvement, there is a standard of digital maturity that spans the industry.”

The official UK rankings by industry sector are as follows:

The study also found that UK Companies achieve higher digital maturity scores (within the top 10 range) than their international counterparts, exceeding average scores of all European countries except Germany. 

John Lockton at BearingPoint concluded: “Logistics should look to retail leaders as digital innovators, given the online and mobile reach of established retailers. However, even here, our study showed that in addition to digital marketing, customer service is also lacking – particularly in terms of live-chat support and responding with succinct and helpful e-mails from customer support.” 

For more information about the Digital Leaders research and to access country specific reports and results, visit digitalleaders.bearingpoint.com