Digital Cargo applications bring the following advantages in transportation processes:

1 . Faster and more effective data transmission: Less of time and paper, caused by use of documents, is prevented in operational processes, ensuring transmission of the details faster and without any error.

2 . Enhanced traceability in details: Any and all data regarding the transportation processes can now be displayed instantly and all shipments are traceable by the authorized persons throughout the transportation period.

3 . Higher data quality: Less of time, caused by documentation process, is eliminated, and all data are archived and kept up-to-date more smoothly, and maintained for longer years.

4 . Provision of more up-to-date details: Any and all details regarding AWBs are kept up-to-date by means of fast data transmission with interstation systematic messages, and users can access all up-to-date details at any time.

5. Environment Friendly: Waste of paper, caused by documentation processes, is eliminated, resulting in protection of nature.

6. Keeping up with technology: Any and all AWB details are transmitted to the electronic medium, enabling all concerned departments to access the most up-to-date and accurate details. This creates the ideal environment for the technological developments such as automation, monitoring and reporting, etc.

And, exercises in team building support a strong company culture. Regular efforts that engage employees with company goals, values, and standards of performance can not only establish a wholesome culture, but also maintain it. How do you get started? In the next few paragraphs we outline how to set up effective team building events and provide examples that can work well in recycling facilities and manufacturing environments.

GETTING STARTED: FOCUS ON THE DETAILS
Before setting up your event, you’ll want to clarify the details. What is the purpose of the team building event, what results do you expect, who will participate, when and how long will it take, and what is your budget?

There are many possible outcomes for a team building event: relationship building among team members, celebration of success or accomplishments, and communication skill building to name a few. A team building event can also be linked to a problem area or weakness that needs addressing. Establishing a purpose and setting goals will keep you focused and create a standard by which you can measure your success.

Next, decide who will participate. Is the event catered towards the entire company, a specific department, or members of a specific leadership group? If your company has multiple shifts, think about how to include all employees.

Consider how much time you’ll need to achieve the goals of the event and where to hold your activity. Team building can be as casual as an after-hours get together or as formal as a highly structured company-wide seminar. The structure depends on the purpose. A celebration for hitting a production goal or safety target might be held off-site, whereas a seminar on developing specific new safety skills might be better suited for an in-house meeting room.

Once the purpose and structure of your team building event have been set, establish a reasonable budget to cover location fees, supplies, food and beverage. Even in-house meetings can incur a cost if refreshments, a catered meal or compensation for off-shift employees become part of the equation.

COMMUNICATING AND SETTING EXPECTATIONS
Achieving your team building goals is linked to what the participants come to expect or what they hope to gain. Your employees might be hesitant or dubious about the experience if it is a first for the company, but clearly communicating what to expect can calm their nerves and get your activity started on the right foot.

Setting expectations is vital, but it is helps build enthusiasm during the run-up to the event. Managers and leaders should personally invite participants and make sure they know the time and location details. Email reminders, handouts and posters can also help build energy and awareness.

THREE TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES
RELATIONSHIP BUILDING:
One of the keys to improving bonds between coworkers is to pick an activity that allows them to share information about themselves. “Two Truths and a Lie” is an easy exercise to get the sharing started. Here’s how it works. Ask participants to think of three things about themselves that others may not know; two things should be true and the third should be made-up. Go around the room and give each person a turn to share their two truths and a lie. The team has to guess which one is false. This is a quick, fun activity that helps team members get to know one another as people, not just co-workers.

CELEBRATION OR SUCCESS:
This type of event often involves an off-site activity. It may require a larger budget to cover food, drinks, admission fees, or potentially all three. Think about what your team might enjoy doing together: bowling, miniature golf, go-kart racing, paintball, and laser tag can instill a team mindset and draw the participants closer together. Bigger budget? Consider working with an activity company that specializes in Amazing Race-style events, escape rooms, or scavenger hunt games. Overall, events such as these unite team members and are a great way to recognize and reward team and individual achievements.

COMMUNICATION SKILLS:
If your goal is to improve communication skills, look to activities like Lost At Sea or Lost On the Moon, which require teams to focus on thinking and persuasion skills and identify effective tactics for communicating. Both examples can be completed in an hour and require no facilitator, supplies or special training. These activities also form a solid foundation as a first-time time team building exercise and set the stage for more complex communication skill building in the future.

CONCLUSION
There are dozens team building activities you can use to develop relationships among co-workers, celebrate successes, and build communication skills. Regardless of the event’s purpose, always make sure you take time to organize the details, set goals and communicate your expectations to the team.

Whether the event is taking place in a meeting room or at a commercial event facility, make sure that engagement and a positive experience are top priorities. Lastly, incorporate team building as an ongoing part your company culture. One-off events can be fun but making team building activities a regular part of your operation will lead to better communication, improved morale, and higher productivity.

1. Usability and user goals
   You’re stranded on a street in a fairly new city and it’s raining heavily. You fire a cab hailing app (on a friend’s recommendation). As a user, what is that one thing you’re hoping to get done as soon as the app opens? If your users have a possibility of being stuck in such a situation, design your mobile app for such users and their goal. Create a UX flow that allows them to book a cab in minimum time and steps. No gimmicks, no jazz — just pure simplicity in the way the user expectation is met!
2. Define a clear action button
   Also known as a CTA (call-to-action), this is the button that makes sure that the user, in the example above, gets a cab. A couple of things to note while defining your action button. One, it must define the action clearly. In the cab app, the action button could be ‘request a cab’ rather than a plain ‘submit’. It will explain the purpose better. Two, an action button should be easily visible and approachable. It is hard to reach the top-left corner of a mobile screen for a right-handed user without stretching or using both the hands. Hold the mobile in your hand and notice the screen area your thumb can reach easily without a stretch. This could be the area to place your action button.
3. Bandwidth is expensive
   Another deterrent in a mobile user experience is high bandwidth consumption. Limit the information to be downloaded on the go. Background services consume a great amount of bandwidth. Create reusable graphic assets for different tasks within the app, such as a cab icon to indicate moving cabs through the city, on a map. Request user choice beyond a section for further download of information, graphic assets, images and videos. Optimise fonts, images and video for mobile consumption. Let’s not make requesting a cab more expensive!
4. Don’t drain the battery
   In Nov 2018, Google at Android Dev Summit, revealed on how a smartphone spends its battery life. They shared that the biggest factor in battery consumption are screen brightness and screen colour. If the app is heavy on calculations or complex navigations, there is a higher chance of mobile battery drain. Background services such as location detection are high on battery consumption as well. The last thing a user needs in an city with heavy rain is their mobile battery running out. Keep the UI simple — lesser, darker colours, shorter navigation and to the limited background services.

This special review by IAOP is based on an evaluation of the entire scoring history of a company since the start of The Global Outsourcing 100 and the World’s Best Outsourcing Advisors programs. The listings are divided into seven categories:

1. Best of GO100 Leaders, featuring companies with the overall highest average scores over all years in the Leaders category. 
2. Best of GO100 Rising Stars, naming companies with the overall highest average scores over all years in the Rising Stars category. 
3. Best of WBOA, recognizing advisory companies with the overall highest average scores over all years. 
4. Multiple Appearances, listing companies that have made the list for at least three years. 
5. Fresh Faces, featuring companies that made their first appearance on the list within the last two years.  
6. Rising Stars to Leaders, including companies that initially made the list as Rising Stars and later made it to Leader. 
7. WBOA 10-Year Club, highlighting advisory companies that made the WBOA list in each of the 10 years the list was compiled.

Outsourceo is proud to be chosen for the Best of The Global Outsourcing 100 list, as it highlights our dedication to clients’ needs and our strong commitment to engineering excellence.  IAOP’s recognition of Outsourceo brings the entire IT industry to the global level.

Over the last few years, many derivate and blockchain-inspired projects have been created. Most of them are not technically blockchains, but rather distributed ledger systems.

Let us dcode the how to build a blockchain in just eight steps. For simplicity, I have used the terms blockchain and distributed ledger system interchangeably in this article.

Step 1: Identify a Suitable Use-case

There’s a ton of hype around blockchain. I’ve read that blockchains can erase global hunger, make the world corruption-free, end poverty and do a lot more without breaking a sweat. Unfortunately, that’s not true. So, step 1 is to identify a use-case that makes business sense.

There are 3 things that blockchains can do very well:

Data Authentication & Verification: this includes immutable storage, digital signatures and encryption. Data in almost any format can be stored in the blockchain. Blockchains can create public-private key pairs and also be used for generating and verifying digital signatures.
Smart Asset Management: this includes issuance, payment, exchange, escrow and retirement. A smart / crypto asset is the tokenized version of a real-world asset e.g. gold, silver, oil, land.
Smart Contracts: This is a term most often mis-understood, but that’s something for another day.

Step 2: Identify the Most Suitable Consensus Mechanism

The original blockchain, which powers the bitcoin crypto-currency, used proof of work as a consensus mechanism. But today there are multiple distributed ledger systems that offer a host of consensus mechanisms such as Proof of stake, Byzantine fault tolerant, Deposit based consensus, Federated Byzantine Agreement, Proof of Elapsed Time, Derived PBFT, Redundant Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Simplified Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Federated consensus, Round Robin and Delegated Proof of Stake.

Depending upon your use-case, you need to choose the consensus mechanism that makes the most sense.

Step 3: Identify the Most Suitable Platform

There are many blockchain platforms out there today and most of them are free and open source. Depending upon the consensus mechanism you chose in step 2, you need to select the most suitable blockchain platform.

Some of the more popular platforms, in alphabetical order are:

1. BigChainDB
2. Chain Core
3. Corda
4. Credits
5. Domus Tower Blockchain
6. Elements Blockchain Platform
7. Eris:db
8. Ethereum
9. HydraChain
10. Hyperledger Fabric
11. Hyperledger Iroha
12. Hyperledger Sawtooth Lake
13. Multichain
14. Openchain
15. Quorum
16. Stellar
17. Symbiont Assembly

Step 4: Designing the Nodes

Blockchain solutions can be permissioned (e.g. a Government run land registry) or permission-less (e.g. Bitcoin, where anyone can become a miner). Blockchain solutions can be private (e.g. a contract management system implemented in a pharmaceutical company), public (e.g. an asset backed cryptocurrency) or hybrid (e.g. a group of banks running a shared KYC platform).

Another factor to consider at this stage is whether the nodes will run on the cloud, on-premise or both. Then comes hardware configuration issues like processors, memory and disk size. You also need to decide on the base operating systems (usually Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat or Windows).

Step 5: Design the Blockchain Instance

Most blockchain platforms need very careful planned configuration for the following elements:

1. Permissions
2. Asset issuance
3. Asset re-issuance
4. Atomic exchanges
5. Key management
6. Multi signatures
7. Parameters
8. Native assets
9. Address formats
10. Key formats
11. Block signatures
12. Hand-shaking

Some parameters can be changed at run-time but some cannot, so this is a very crucial step.

Step 6: Building the APIs

Some blockchain platforms come with pre-made APIs while some don’t. The major categories of APIs that you would need are for:

Generating key pairs and addresses
Performing audit related functions
Data authenticatin through digital signatures and hashes
Data strage and retrieval
Smart-asset lifecycle management –issuance, payment, exchange, escrw and retirement
Smart contracts

Step 7: Design the Admin and User Interface

At this stage you would need to choose the front end and programming languages (e.g. HTML5, CSS, PHP, C#, Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, Golang, Solidity, Angular JS Nodejs). You would also need to choose external databases (e.g. MySQL, MongoDB) as well as servers (including Web servers, FTP servers, mail servers).

Step 8: Adding Future Tech

You can greatly enhance the power of your Blockchain solution by integrating Artificial Intelligence, Biometrics, Bots, Cloud, Cognitive services, Containers, Data Analytics, Internet of Things and Machine Learning.