Inform has ranked 5th in the Digital Pioneers of Medium-Sized Businesses of 2020 as compiled by German business magazine WirtschaftsWoche.
Inform is a market leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and optimisation software to facilitate improved decision making.
Based in Aachen, Germany, the company has been in the optimisation business for 50 years and serves a wide span of logistics industries including ports, maritime, and intermodal terminals with both add-on optimization modules as well as TOS solutions.
Inform has progressed ten spots up the ranking from its 2019 position at 15th place to claim 5th place overall for 2020. In their annual study, WirtschaftsWoche evaluated 4,000 medium-sized companies narrowing the list down to the top 50 who are honoured with the award; in the study, each company receives a “digital score,” which is comprised of two-thirds digital performance and one-third ability to grow.
“It is certainly an honour the entire company carries, but it also reflects positively on our innovative work carried out in the maritime and intermodal industries in 2020,” commented Dr. Eva Savelsberg, SVP of Inform Logistics division.
“We were amongst the first to implement a highly successful machine learning project with CTB in Hamburg where our Machine Learning module is feeding a real-time operational system with improved data predictions for container outbound mode of transport and subsequently improved dwell-time predictions.”
“Inform was also shortlisted in the Intermodal Association of North America’s (IANA) 2020 Bright Ideas Innovation Incubator for our work in pushing our train load planning algorithms to include the ability to plan train’s to be as aerodynamically efficient as possible while also considering multiple other loading constraints.”
“Finally, in 2020 Inform was also named as the AI/Optimisation supplier in the Port of Rotterdam’s forward-thinking Container Exchange Route (CER) project which is truly an innovative step forward in rethinking how containers move within the port environment.”
Notwithstanding Inform’s long success story spanning more than five decades and with well over 1,000 customers around the world, one could argue that the time for digital decision intelligence has only just begun and has certainly been accelerated by the global pandemic of 2020.
Over the past few years, data availability, computing power and, of course, the quality of algorithms have increased dramatically, such that nowadays one in two companies considers AI to be a key technology to remain competitive. While digital business models and processes are becoming more and more a natural aspect of everyday business and life throughout all industries, potential applications for digital decision making are multiplying enormously.
This is especially true given that ubiquitous trends such as increasing complexity, dynamics, volatility, and ultimately the unpredictability of many decision parameters require agile planning and management methods.
