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‌Patching development: Information technology adjustments in the Mauritian logistical sector

‌Marine Al Dahdah and Mathieu Quet

In February 2021, the Decathlon Group unveiled an enormous 26,000 square meter warehouse on the island of Mauritius to serve as a logistical hub between Asia, where most of the company’s products are manufactured, and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Middle East – regions whose emerging middle classes represent a growing share of the brand’s consumers. During an official visit to the site, the Mauritian Minister of Finance, Renganaden Padayachy, reminded the audience that the choice of the island (over competing locations such as Dubai and Durban) reinforced the importance of Mauritius as an ideal hub for investors and for the continued export of goods to other countries in the region. The president of Mauritius Free Port Development (MFD), which manages the warehouse, emphasised that the event was significant not only because of the volume of containers and goods flowing in and out, but also for Mauritians themselves, because of the transfer of expertise and knowledge the warehouse’s operation would entail.

As these speeches made explicit, such an event points to one particular development strategy adopted by states and firms in the context of industrial capitalism, which consists in attracting and redistributing flows of goods they do not manufacture, in order to benefit from the surplus value generated during transport and storage operations. This logistical engagement with capitalism aims at capturing value through the management of flows. Although it is not new, this strategy has assumed growing importance during the last decades, owing to the ever-expanding volume of goods traded globally; in return, it has increasingly contributed to shape the material and social manifestations of globalisation, through the multiplication of warehouses, megaports, megaships, and freezones that populate developing landscapes. Mauritius provides an interesting illustration of this phenomenon when one takes into account the various policies shaped by successive Mauritian governments over the past several decades to attract investment and goods flows – what some authors refer to as ‘concentration’ or ‘hubbing’ (Schnepel 2018). Indeed, since its independence – and especially since the 1990s – Mauritius has developed various incentive structures for foreign companies, beginning with the creation of a free port in 1992 and continuing with the development of offshoring and telecommunications services (maintenance, call centres). This policy has been part of a forward-looking conceptualisation on the part of the government and private sector actors, and it benefitted from the support of the country’s Economic Development Board. It aimed at overcoming Mauritius’ isolated status and turning its geographical, language, and cultural characteristics into decisive assets over other destinations.

One essential way to achieve such a strategy and to successfully attract flows is to offer to make them ‘seamless’, as promoted on the MFD website. In Deborah Cowen’s analysis of contemporary logistics, she observes that ‘there is a growing common sense that the competitiveness of firms, nations, and supranational regions is contingent on their capacity to mobilise “seamless” supply chains, to circulate stuff in a timely and reliable way’ (2014: 58). According to this logistical understanding, seamlessness signifies the quality of flows moving efficiently and smoothly, without any disruption or slowdown – an objective that can never fully be achieved but fuels the imagination and normative approaches of what would be an ideal supply chain.

This leads us to the following research question: How can one provide, create, or manufacture seamlessness? What are the material, organisational, epistemic ways of fabricating global, yet smooth, flows of goods? Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2019) describe as ‘operations’ the multiple ways or tools through which flows are managed, manipulated, and integrated: Enterprise resource planning software, cranes, containers, ports, and free trade agreements then appear as multiple and heterogeneous operations aiming to facilitate and accelerate the flows of goods and their transformation into flows of capital. These authors submit the hypothesis that the ‘concatenation’ of operations is one of the central challenges in technological capitalism today: creating homogeneity between operations of capital means making them interoperable and entails the constant production of intercommunication. Mezzadra and Neilson’s intervention opens an avenue for research as it invites analysis of how operations and their concatenation manifest ‘on the ground’ and contribute to the globalisation of trade.

In this perspective, the Mauritian development model (Chazan-Gillig and Widmer 2001; Grégoire 2016) sheds interesting light on this phenomenon as it illustrates an essential trait of capitalist revitalisation strategies to attract flows and capture value: the increasing integration of logistics and digital technology.

This is what we observed over the course of two research trips (in January 2020 and January 2022) during which we conducted two series of interviews: first (S1, 2020: 17 interviews) with various actors from the Mauritian digital sector, and second (S2, 2022: 25 interviews) with a company specialising in information technology services and solutions for the logistics sector. Our study allowed us to document ‘operational’ capitalism in the convergence between the digital and logistical sectors. However, it also led us to a further analysis, beyond Mezzadra and Neilson’s initial hypothesis: while the imperative to produce ‘seamless’ flows is shared by all actors in international logistics (Cowen 2014), Mauritian actors have had to implement specific strategies due to their resource levels, geographic position, and target markets. We will focus in particular on the concept of ‘patching,’ which refers to the fact that achieving fluid circulation requires a kind of technological bricolage, and the continuous adaptation of information systems that must be fitted and adjusted in order to respond to local constraints. The manufacture of seamless flows, observed through the lens of the convergence of Mauritian logistics and information technology (IT), requires a particular kind of customisation work, the innovative nature of which must be better assessed in order to more fully describe the integration of developing countries into global capitalism. Furthermore, patching operations shed a particular light upon adjustment and adaptation practices as a recurring feature of the experience of technological globalisation in the Global South. Patching is both a process required by ‘seamlessification’ and an answer to the great heterogeneity of IT solutions involved by the globalisation of markets. On one hand, the Mauritian IT sector is highly dependent on IT systems often imposed by the most powerful actors of the logistical industry; on the other hand, the lower level of resources of clients operating in Mauritius’ trade area often requires finding cost-effective solutions in order to adjust dominant IT systems to cheaper, tailored situations. In that sense, patching simultaneously appears as a prominent task in the fabrication of global logistics and as a specific answer to the coexistence of heterogeneous IT systems in terms of cost and standardisation level.

In order to make our argument, we first present the digital turn in the logistics sector as it was recounted to us by the actors we interviewed. Next, we detail the main IT activities required to create a seamless flow. And finally, we analyse the importance of the practice of patching and attempt to show its specificity within a development context.

A digital turn in logistics?

The main actors in our story are a logistics company and an information services company, both based in Mauritius. The history of these companies and their collaboration serves to illustrate the importance of the digital turn in the logistics industry.

Mauritius Free Port Development (MFD) is the chief private operator in charge of the development of Mauritius’s free port. The project for a free port on the island was part of the economic development strategy put into place by the nation following its independence in 1968. During the years leading up to independence, the government had prepared a free zone policy by carrying out various studies of free zones in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean in order to draw inspiration from various models (Rogerson 1993). In 1970, determined to implement a free zone policy, the government of the newly independent nation passed the Export Processing Zone Act. The zone’s main objective was to attract foreign investors in order to develop the island’s industrial sector. It must be emphasised that until the late 1960s, Mauritius’s primary export commodity was sugar cane, which accounted for 90% of all exports (Ramtohul and Erikson 2018). By reducing customs duties and labour oversight, the government sought to develop industrialisation on the island, resulting in the growth of the textile manufacturing sector over the course of the 1970s and 1980s (Neveling 2014). The free port zone created in 1992 was primarily intended to complement this original policy by facilitating exports, simplifying customs controls, and improving the island’s transport and export infrastructure.

The legislation surrounding the free port offered a set of liberal incentive measures targeting businesses seeking a hub for storage, assemblage, and redistribution in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Mauritius’s free port promoted its many advantages: rapid customs procedures, duty-free and VAT-free goods and services, tax-exempt status for companies, the possibility for a company’s stock to be 100% held by foreigners, free repatriation of profits, no exchange controls, a 50% reduction in port handling fees, the possibility for 50% of sales revenue to come from the local market, and access to the island’s offshore banking services. Along with this legal and financial infrastructure, Mauritius boasts a political and economic stability that is rare in Africa, a bilingualism (French and English) that is useful for international communications, a highly educated and trained population, and good digital connectivity, all of which are elements that further enhance the island’s strategic position as an international logistical hub.

The MFD was created in 1995 within the context of the implementation of the free port zone, in the wake of a series of other institutions created to oversee the development of the port zone and the island’s logistical capacities (first MMA and then MPA and MCargoHandling). MFD’s role is to manage and develop the free port territory: ‘MFD has a 60-year contract with the Mauritian government to develop the 25 hectares of land that make up the free port zone. Initially, MFD concentrated heavily on textiles in the early 2000s, but there were some rough years in the textile industry, so it had to reinvent itself and find other activities’ (MFD IT Officer, January 2022). From seafood to medications, by way of textiles and sugar, MFD significantly diversified its activities beyond the zone of the free port, with warehouses in inland regions and at the international airport, in order to meet the growing needs of its clients. Thus, it became a company specialising in logistics and distribution, targeting the Mauritian and Indian Ocean markets, as explained by one executive: ‘Our job is to receive, store, and deliver goods, and whether it’s cars, pharmaceutical products, or mass-market goods, our job stays the same—it’s easy to understand, but difficult to execute’ (MFD IT Officer, January 2022). From a more analytic point of view, we may note that MFD’s goal is first and foremost to capture goods flows by offering its services to the manufacturing firms that produce these flows and the consumption sites that consume them. This goal is apparent if we look at how MFD won the Decathlon contract, as explained to us by an MFD executive:

One of the major projects we’ve had is Decathlon. To close a booster in Asia and open it in Mauritius. We built a special Decathlon booster where we handle all the Asia flows for Africa, the Middle East, and even some of the European flows. We are able to support our clients even beyond our walls. It took some time to get it going. Decathlon corresponds precisely to the reason why the free port was created—to help these multinationals get closer to their markets; 40% of the Decathlon booster in Mauritius is East Africa and Réunion. When you look at the development strategy, it’s to be as close as possible to their markets. Mauritius is a fairly stable country. The shortlist was between Durban and Mauritius. The Durban port was less efficient and had problems. There is exceptional logistical expertise in Mauritius, and it was also thanks to that that Mauritius was chosen. (MFD IT officer, January 2022)

To carry out this exercise in capturing goods flows, optimisation is essential, which explains the importance technological development has taken on within logistics since the beginning of the twenty-first century. After having developed its warehousing and distribution activities in the free port zone over the course of 15 years, beginning in the early 2010s, MFD undertook a major project to standardise its operations to simplify procedures and better structure its reception, storage, and distribution activities – all in the pursuit of organisational efficiency. As explained by one manager: ‘We had hundreds of different processes; today we have 22. We changed our approach, we standardised our activities’. One important aspect of this renovation work was to acquire technology for the digital management of logistical operations, turning logistics into information work:

When you say ‘logistics’, people think of containers, transportation. What we do today is handle information. The actions that come at the end of a sequence—lifting up a box and putting it on a pallet—that’s the easy part. It’s everything that comes before, managing the information, that’s the real heart of a logistician’s job. And that job is tightly connected to information technology. Logistics requires automation and robotics solutions, and that attracts people from the IT sector we didn’t have before. (Cybernaptics business development manager, January 2022)

In line with the findings of Posner (2018), digital technology is recognised as an essential tool for the modernisation and efficiency of the logistics sector, as one employee pointed out to us: ‘Today, companies like MFD cannot function without digitalisation’ (Cybernaptics Business Development Manager, January 2022).

This is where the company Cybernaptics comes in. Its founder, Viv Padayachy, was originally an employee at MFD, where he was head of information operations and services. However, in 2009, the company largely outsourced its IT operations, leaving Padayachy in a position to start his own business, which originally had six employees. One of them recalls: ‘There were six of us in the beginning, and our first client was MFD, which gave us the support contract for their IT infrastructure, which we still have to this day’. From the outset, the company branded itself as an ‘IT services’ and ‘business solutions’ company, while also making clear its desire to position itself within the domain of ‘software development’. By the end of the 2010s, Cybernaptics had approximately 50 employees and had become one of the most expert companies in the information/logistics nexus in Mauritius, as one of its department heads emphasises: ‘Cybernaptics is the only Mauritian digital company that has expertise in logistics. We are also among the first to begin robotisation’. The heart of Cybernaptics’ work is logistics, but the company offers various types of services, which can be divided into three main categories: hardware, software, and clouding. The company also intends to develop services in the area of the Internet of Things.

Cybernaptics’ growth demonstrates the importance that digital technology has taken on in the logistics sector. As an employee, who had been working at MFD before joining Cybernaptics, emphasises:

Before, everything was done by hand on paper; there were pre-defined zones and notebooks where the supervisors would write down in what zones the products should go. There were tons of paper at the end of the day. All that was digitalised with the use of an internal Wi-Fi network, Wi-Fi hand-held scanners; they go through the aisles and gather the products and get them ready for delivery. We reduced our paper usage because we print just the bar codes. (Cybernaptics sales engineer, January 2022)

Indeed, this transformation wrought profound changes, including more QR codes to allow for more precise scanning. Another employee mentions the use of RFID chips in bins of tuna, which facilitate and accelerate inventory production by allowing metal detectors to count the bins and make quantities visible in real time. He goes on to mention the fantasy of a warehouse without employees, where robotic carts go along the aisles and drones take from the inventory. But for Mauritian companies, such fantasies raise problems of cost that remain difficult to overcome: ‘Everyone would like to have these technologies, but can we manage them, do we have the means to outfit a 100,000-euro warehouse in order to program drone inventory technology? Software and maintenance will cost us money’ (Cybernaptics General Manager, January 2022). And yet, these words highlight the fundamental importance of digital technologies in running warehouses. In other words, it is possible to speak of a digital or information turn in Mauritian logistics. As Padayachy puts it, ‘In the 2000s, when we talked about logistics, it referred to warehousing and transport. Today, logistics is much more of a way of managing information.’ Thus, we shall now turn to the digital infrastructure that supports logistics.

The digital infrastructure of seamlessness

One way to grasp the challenges faced by actors in operational capitalism is to identify the various tasks an organisation must oversee, from the arrival of a container at Port Louis to the reshipment of products by MFD. Our aim in doing so is to arrive at a kind of synthetic clarity, and we limit ourselves to the major tasks described to us throughout our study.

Logistics most often entails the intermodal management of merchandise transport. Goods are carried from their sites of production to sites of consumption through a combination of means of transport, including road, rail, maritime, and air networks. As one of the heads of MFD explains:

We are laser-focused on the departures and arrivals of the ships. Because of how few ships are in circulation, when one arrives there is a great deal to unload, so it comes in waves. We have many containers that have to be physically gathered and unloaded; it could be 50 to 80 containers at once to be gathered very quickly and unloaded. When you have a ship full of bicycles, it’s difficult. In terms of volume it ends up being the same but it’s in bits and pieces. It’s not the same to have 3,000 containers that you can unload in 20 passes versus in 200. (MFD IT officer, January 2022)

In the case of unloading containers, there is a standard message for creating electronic reports between two commercial partners in order to certify delivery of a container: the ‘container gate-in/gate-out message’, or CODECO. The CODECO is part of a larger set of messages defined and standardised by the United Nations in 1987, the UN EDIFACT (UN Nations Rules for Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport). These standards are intended to structure datasets in order to facilitate exchanges between autonomous information and information management systems, a process already analysed in the case of the logistics of mining in the Central African Copperbelt (Blaszkiewicz 2023). In the case of MFD, the company receives delivery information from some of its main clients by way of a CODECO message. As one of the heads of Cybernaptics explains, ‘CODECO is a messaging standard used internationally for container gate in and gate out in. We added a script so that the MFD system can generate CODECO messages to its client. MFD is using this with three of the biggest shipping lines in Mauritius’. However, two things must be noted here. First, the data structuring offered by the EDIFACT Standard does not guarantee an immediate connection between MFD and its client (for example, the shipping company Maersk). And second, since EDIFACT is but one set of standards among others, with some clients, different operations must be used to communicate between their information systems and those of MFD. These translation operations, which are indispensable for tracking ships and containers, are carried out by information solutions developed by Cybernaptics, as one of its company heads explained to us: ‘The messages that clients send are all in different formats. We have scripts that monitor these messages and push them into the different systems. Reading these messages and pushing them into the systems requires specific applications’.

Once a container has been received, MFD staff unload it, palletise those goods that require it, and send the goods on to the warehouses. MFD runs warehouses that total approximately 70,000 square feet. Some of these warehouses are specialised according to product type (seafood and frozen goods that require specific temperatures; bulk goods; dry goods). While warehouses are essential elements in the logistical infrastructure provided by MFD, the importance of the digital systems required for storage – most significantly, the warehouse management system – must not be overlooked. As we saw in the previous section, in the middle of the 2010s, MFD undertook a significant renovation of its information systems. It decided to use the IT service management company Hardis, which specialises in warehouse management services. A warehouse management system makes it possible to identify and oversee goods, quantities, and locations in a warehouse. Software management is not the only service offered by Hardis, and as one of our interviewees emphasised, MFD chose the company because it also offers complementary services such as the installation of monitoring drones that automate the inventory. This inventory process, which covers everything from the set of pallets in a container down to the very object inside a box, involves creating and printing identifiers that are placed on merchandise units – a process that today is fully digitised.

Whereas up until the 2010s, software entry was done by hand, over the past few years MFD has acquired a fleet of hand scanners. Identifiers are paired with bar codes that warehouse employees can scan, on pallets, boxes, and goods. These scanners were provided by a leading company in the market: Zebra. This company, an American multinational, is one of the largest global suppliers of professional mobile handsets and solutions for data capturing, barcode printing, and radio frequency identification. With more than 8,800 employees and a client base in over 170 countries, the group provides tools that are indispensable for digitisation in the logistics sector, including mobile handsets for warehouse staff that range from pocket computers to vehicle-mounted computers and tablets with integrated digital intelligence, as well as scanners that can scan anything, anywhere, and in any conditions – including dirty and damaged bar codes – and can hold up in difficult work environments such as megaports. Cybernaptics was the first company to implement Zebra’s solutions in Mauritius, and, as one of its managers explained to us, this know-how has also helped them develop informational and logistical activities in the rest of Africa: ‘We were pioneers in offering Zebra’s services in Mauritius. The knowledge we have of the port of Mauritius and of tools like Zebra—there are not many in Africa who have that. And we have been doing this for a decade. We are positioning ourselves as champions of trackability and mobility in the zone. We offer both software and hardware solutions’ (Cybernaptics senior business developer, January 2022).

In order to make these scanners, printers, and computers work, warehouses needed to be fully connected to Wi-Fi, and this obligatory connectivity required specific adaptations and interventions. As Padayachy explained: ‘Warehouses form metal cages that prevent signals from passing through. The metal structure creates shadow zones. Racks had to be connected with copper wires to prevent these shadow zones’ (Cybernaptics general manager, January 2022). Warehouses are not only storage sites; they are also sites of constant information transmission. As one Cybernaptics employee explains, clients now have the option to view all their merchandise in the port zone: ‘[This happens via the] CFS, container fret system. You will have the number of clients for a specific container and the number of packages and their position in the warehouse. It generates gate passes to get your packages. You can have multiple containers and know exactly where your different packages are in different warehouses’ (Cybernaptics software developer, January 2022).

These data collected in real time, stored, and transmitted by connected computers allow for a more efficient division of merchandise lots: once the contents of containers have been assigned to warehouses, new lots of merchandise are composed to be sent to various clients. Since there is software that allows for very precise subdivision of the contents of containers, even within boxes, clients can order specific quantities of products, down to the unit. From this point of view, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the warehouses managed by MFD – which serve not only clients across the Indian Ocean but also Mauritian clients – is that within them, merchandise lots are subdivided into very small quantities. And because some goods (for example, tubes of shaving cream) are delivered to small-scale Mauritian retailers, MFD has chosen to negotiate in very small quantities – which is sometimes a challenge, since some brands negotiate exclusive contracts with logistics companies – that is, if a logistics company distributes a company’s products, it must supply all businesses in the zone, from supermarkets to small country stores. This precise and detailed handling of quantities led MFD to develop (and then to extend to all its clients) an online tracking system that constitutes an additional element of warehouses’ digital infrastructure.

Once goods have been ordered by clients, the warehouse must then send them out. Warehouse workers load up goods, which are then transported in another container or by truck to a retailer on the island. Once packages have been sent out, another piece of software structures the transport activity: transport management software, which organises the allocation of routes, transport times, and the order of delivery. Of course, this is not the only digital tool used at this stage: for example, ‘weighbridges’ are used to measure the weights of trucks and to monitor any loss or diversion of goods during delivery operations. Developers at Cybernaptics describe different essential software they deployed on the port zone during recent years:

Salesflex is a sales and distribution system. You have all your sales orders, your products, your clients. The salesmen use it to print receipts instantly, with a Zebra mobile printer. You can also manage payment through the service. You know exactly what products are left in your truck, what you sold. You have reports at the end of the day, by products, by clients, by type of payments. (Cybernaptics business development manager, January 2022)

The online tracking system is a portal to generate reports and requests, to view and place orders, through a dashboard where clients can see delivery, reception, and stock reports and they can place new orders. It serves as a basic reporting tool on received goods, current stocks, and deliveries. The purpose is to minimise format errors in the system. The client sees all the reception, delivery, stock reports and they can place orders by selecting the articles and view their order history and delivery status. It’s online, accessible. (Cybernaptics senior business developer, January 2022)

From CODECO messages providing data when containers arrive, to the delivery of half a dozen tubes of shaving cream to a small Mauritian retailer, we now have an overview of the multitude of software currently in use to enable all these logistical operations. In order to make this process ‘seamless’, many IT developers must work to allow these information suites to communicate between one another, since they each speak different languages. This patching activity, this work of creating patches, constitutes the heart of Cybernaptics’ activity and the heart of the information turn in logistics.

Patching and patchwork

In this section, we argue that an essential function of digital activity within logistics is to allow for communication between the countless software tools that make up the digital infrastructure of logistics. The sociotechnological production of seamless and homogeneous flows involves ongoing work to bring tools into communication – an activity we refer to here as ‘patching’ and ‘patchwork’ – to underline alternately patching activity as it is being done, and patching as a category of labour. A better account and description of this phenomenon is necessary, first, because it makes it possible to better understand the materiality of the activity that goes into manufacturing digital infrastructures (the social production of infrastructures), and second, because it makes it possible to nuance the opposition between the supposedly innovative activity that takes place in the global North (software development) and the supposedly less innovative activity of maintenance and repair based in the global South (IT services). To make this argument, we draw on various works that have already pointed to the importance of connecting heterogenous infrastructures (Vertesi 2014) and of issues of interoperability within the digital environment of contemporary logistics (Gregson et al. 2017).

The interoperability of digital services – that is, their capacity to communicate between one another – is an essential characteristic of contemporary capitalism and its growing need for interconnections. It is a matter of an infrastructural process that must be ensured and constantly renewed, and which, once in place, is often forgotten – until a malfunction reminds us of its existence. This complex operation involves coding databases, languages, software, and equipment, and it has both economic aspects (for example, competition and profitability) and legal ones (for example, data protection). Indeed, one of Cybernaptics’ heads of department states that for economic reasons, it does not develop its products from scratch:

At the launch of Cybernaptics, we were developing from scratch. We saw that that wasn’t profitable. Developers move around a lot, and we’re not a huge corporation like Accenture, with hundreds of developers—if in the middle of development, a developer quits, it’s hard. We focus more on customisations, integrations. We offer clients solutions that we currently have, and we try to customise the solution to meet the client’s need. We have solutions that we have developed such as online tracking; that solution will go on top of their system. (Cybernaptics business development manager, January 2022)

The work of development is, however, not entirely absent from the company’s activities, but it must be understood in terms of adaptation, summarised as follows: ‘We first get an understanding of the client’s needs and then propose systems that will match this need at the best price’ (Cybernaptics business development manager, January 2022).

What are the major characteristics of this work of adaptation? We must first take into account the multiplicity of systems and the difficulty of making them interoperable, as one of the heads of Cybernaptics explains: ‘Each company has its own software; we have developed EDI so that systems can communicate between each other. Doing so manually is not possible’. This is where Cybernaptics plays a front-line role, by interconnecting different types of databases and software. Transportation management and warehousing software are paired with other software that must constantly be integrated, as the following overview of Cybernaptics’ various activities suggests:

Another solution that is added on top of clients’ systems is the CPMS, the Container Park Management System. For containers that are kept at the port, we can know which of those are going to leave first, according to how they are arranged. We also have a TMS, Transport Management System, software, that’s for planning transport in term of the outflow and inflow of containers. This solution is integrated into the warehouses’ management system (Reflex) as well as the accounting system (Navision). (Cybernaptics business development manager, January 2022).

This continuous adaptation of the software in place, its development and intercommunication, takes time and requires complex and individualised development projects lasting several months, as this developer explained to us:

We specifically design solutions for specific clients. It can take us 2 to 3 months to develop and deploy a solution. From there we enhance it and adapt it to other clients. It’s not the same system, it’s different implementations every time and so it needs some development; for instance for Tag it took us 6 months to adapt the initial solution from one client to the next one. (Cybernaptics senior business developer, January 2022)

As an extension of this activity of interoperability, Cybernaptics also offers ‘on top’ services, which connect into the general software architecture to simplify clients’ processes:

We developed Salesflex, which is a mobile vending tool, an Android app that can be connected to any software like Navision or Oracle, and if you have mobile vendors, they can sell directly from their mobile device where they have their stock downloaded, make sales, manage payment and invoices, and they can even push sales data directly into their accounting systems. Before, they would have a notebook where they wrote down sales and had to enter them into the system later at the office; now they can do it immediately. (Cybernaptics senior business developer, January 2022)

‘On top’ services are developed on the basis of the software suite already in place; they add a function or service that the original software (which is often proprietary) either does not include or for which the cost is too high.

The question of cost is absolutely crucial to understanding the context in which patching is mobilised. This activity takes place in a particularly low-resource context, as one of the Mauritian developers we met explained: ‘In Africa, there are many clients who cannot afford Zebra. But with lower-cost products, they can move technologically and digitise their operations.’ Patching is also used to pay less or to be able to operate with degraded equipment, since proprietary materials and software are financially, and sometimes geographically, inaccessible (in Africa, for example, or in the middle of the Indian Ocean). As explained in the same interview:

In terms of price, Zebra is not at all accessible to everyone; it’s like a Tesla or a Porsche. Today, there are non-branded products from China that penetrate the market. Whereas a Zebra scanner costs 2,000 euros, these can be bought for less than 500. To respond to this competition from China, we have a product like PointMobile, which is from Korea and meets our needs for quality at a lower cost than Zebra. Initially, we tested Chinese non-branded products but the quality was lacking. (Cybernaptics senior business developer, January 2022)

The business has adapted to these cost challenges and offers software customisations from an Android operating system, in order to provide lower-cost software solutions to its African clients who have software needs but limited budgets.

The issue of technological innovation constitutes another important challenge for enterprises like Cybernaptics. The engineers we met in Mauritius highlight two innovations that today have become indispensable, and which have major consequences for their work and for the dependencies and costs associated with the digital infrastructures of logistics: clouding and automation.

The current use of ‘clouding’ services raises numerous security problems: ‘Before, we had in-house physical servers. Now, with the cloud, there are new services to securitise cloud servers; firewalls and internet access control are important’. These developments took place very rapidly, in less than 10 years. The adoption of the cloud has now become routine, as explained during the interview: ‘Cloud hosting has become very popular, and as a result we have fewer physical servers’. Various actors within the Mauritian IT sector mentioned the challenges of data security and dependency on cloud service providers such as Amazon and Google. What are the risks involved in shifting from a company’s physical servers to Amazon servers? Some logistics actors prefer to maintain their own physical servers for security reasons as well as for reasons of data sovereignty, but the COVID-19 crisis dramatically accelerated the clouding of business data, which is increasingly hosted by these large-scale private American operators. The new technological challenge for Mauritian IT workers is to ensure data security at a distance, using new firewall and blockchain technologies to encode and protect as much as possible the data circulating from one cloud to another. However, there are few IT workers on the island trained in these technologies.

The trend toward automation constitutes another imperative for technological innovation that Mauritian operators both implement and question simultaneously, as one manager explained with regard to a project to automate exchange rates: ‘The trend is robotisation, but robotise what? We see that the demand is coming from the financial sector but we weren’t familiar with that field at first. So we developed solutions alongside banking sector experts. That solution isn’t going to work for all the actors in the sector’. In this context, Cybernaptics also offers solutions that make it possible to connect heterogenous environments automatically. Our interlocutors also mentioned the automation of warehouse inventories by drones, explaining that such systems come with considerable costs that would need to be amortised, thus raising the question of whether it is profitable to automate inventories of low-cost basic items such as potatoes or flour.

All these various tasks require patching and thus presuppose the intervention of actors such as Cybernaptics, which allow various environments and databases to communicate between one another. This leads to the question: What is ‘customisation’ in these cases? What does a ‘tailored’ solution mean, and what does the adaptation or matching of a solution to a consumer involve? The answers to these questions are particularly unclear given that the explanations offered by Cybernaptics and MFD employees often contain veritable contradictions: for example, when one declares that the customisation of systems is what is most important, and that this is what Cybernaptics does, whereas, for another employee, the most important is the service aspect of their work: ‘We do customisation but also support; that’s very important. It’s the service that comes with the software that is the most important. For us, it’s not just about selling the solution’.

Here, we emphasise the importance of interoperability, which Pelizza (2016) has analysed as a ‘process of institutional reordering’ (Pelizza 2016: 305). Interoperability requires several conditions. There must be datasets: sensors and forms must have been ‘populated’, which requires interfaces. Datasets must be accessible: they must be stored and circulated on networks, whether they are created ad hoc, requested, or purchased. They must be clean and, above all, interoperable. They must ‘speak’ the same language, so that they can be connected via a common frame of reference. The goals of interoperability are defined and inscribed in the specifications given to developers. These determine the model of data mining that developers create, going back and forth between development and testing until the moment of transfer to the production environment. Lastly, interconnections operate within a social organisation that determines the possible use of their results. All of these elements are sociotechnical: none is a given, and each raises questions of regulation, depends on the circulation of data, and requires the coordination of expertise and interests, data providers, workers, and users.

Conclusion

This case study contributes to show how seamlessness is manufactured on the ground. Although it does not document other aspects of that production, such as the warehouse or ship labour analysed by other authors (Flécher 2023; Gaborieau 2016), it illustrates an important characteristic of contemporary capitalism: the integration, within a single site, of logistical, digital, and financial expertise and infrastructure. The Mauritian model of development perfectly illustrates the regeneration of capitalism through strategies for attracting flows of goods, which involve the increasing integration of the logistics-finance-digital-technology triad. Thus, it becomes important to turn toward more nuanced analyses of the digital infrastructure that supports the logistical activity essential to the international circulation of flows of data and goods.

We have endeavoured to show the central role of digital tools in this activity. From communications between container carriers to their arrival at the free port and the unloading of pallets, all the way through to delivery to retailers on the island, logistical operations depend on a multitude of software programs. To make this movement of merchandise ‘seamless’, many IT developers must work to make information programs that speak different languages communicate between one another. However, the human and financial resources necessary to implement this interoperability, which is now indispensable, are lacking in developing countries.

African countries, following Mauritius’s lead, are looking for more economical and accessible solutions in order to meet the infrastructure and digital challenges that today are central to the circulation of merchandise flows. From this point of view, we may say that Cybernaptics embodies a trend toward frugal, efficient, tailored seamlessness, and reminds us of the degree to which intermediaries play an indispensable role in the mobilisation of digital environments and in the creation of innovation under constraints, with limited human and financial resources. This activity of adaptation, patching and patchwork constitute the heart of the information turn in logistics observed from the point of view of global Southerners. It therefore highlights one specificity of technological globalisation in Global South countries: seamlessness production not only answers to a requirement set by global logistical capitalism but is also a strategy through which social actors make commensurable IT systems or technological tools that largely differ in nature. The IT communication and track and trace device standards imposed by the most powerful companies and countries cannot be followed by the vast majority of commercial actors in Global South countries, due to the lack of resources and to their frequent inadequacy to local contexts. As a consequence, the IT systems and devices coexisting in hubbing locations such as Mauritius are highly heterogeneous.

In a way, patching is not specific to Global South countries: coding and manufacturing IT systems are patching activities at the most basic level. The singularity of Global South countries is, however, to be continuously exposed to this activity to cope with systems promoted – sometimes imposed – by the most powerful players of the industry and mostly financially inaccessible for small-scale firms operating in the South. In this sense, Global South patching presents specificities as compared to patching ‘in general’; it also gives indications of what patching could be even in richer settings, as some of them go through crises and become weakened. Patching from the South then appears as a way for actors to overturn financial and infrastructural constraints by offering adjustment solutions between heterogeneous systems. In that sense, patching is playing a key role in globalisation processes by making heterogeneous systems, often determined by differences in financial power, commensurable and interoperable. It is simultaneously an answer to the seamlessness imperative and a situated strategy to circumvent and subvert situations determined by the globally uneven distribution of resources and technological equipment – and in turn it could also become a model for flow capture and global flow manufacturing without regard for location, be it in the North or in the South.

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