By Maria Kalamatas | May 15, 2025
Frankfurt —
The dashboard looks great—until something stops reporting.
A sensor falls offline. A container isn’t pinging. A delivery van crosses a geofence but doesn’t show up on the map. And suddenly, no one knows where the shipment is, or if it even moved.
Across global logistics hubs, the Internet of Things—once hailed as the backbone of smart freight—is starting to show its age. Or maybe just its limits.
“There’s always a glitch somewhere,” said a network operator working out of an inland terminal near Stuttgart. “And it’s never the same one twice.”
Sensors wear out. Batteries die. Firmware updates collide with outdated systems. And in the rush to digitize every inch of movement, companies are now realizing that more data doesn’t always mean better control.
In many warehouses and transport fleets, IoT devices have multiplied—attached to forklifts, containers, pallets, even uniforms. At first, it brought visibility. Then, it brought noise.
“There’s too much data, and not enough people who know what to do with it,” a freight controller said bluntly. “You can see everything. But you don’t always know what matters.”
This flood of metrics—temperature readings, idle times, real-time location stamps—has outpaced the tools meant to interpret them. Operators find themselves overwhelmed, trying to catch up to the very tech meant to simplify their jobs.
And when something breaks? The team spends hours checking hardware, resetting apps, calling IT. Meanwhile, goods wait.
That’s not to say IoT doesn’t work. It does—often brilliantly. But it demands maintenance, interpretation, and constant context. Without those, it becomes a web of blinking signals few people understand.
The quiet shift now? Simplification.
Some logistics firms are stripping back. Fewer sensors. Better ones. Smarter filters on dashboards. Less dependency on ping frequency, more on outcome tracking.
Because in the end, the best technology in logistics isn’t what shows up—it’s what works when nobody’s looking.
