2008-11: 2008 3rd Party Logistics Survey Released

Paris, October 6, 2008 – Capgemini in cooperation with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Oracle and DHL today released an in-depth study into the current state of logistics outsourcing. The study is based on a survey of 1,644 logistics executives from North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America and identifies a number of key findings:

http://3plstudy.com/

2008-11: It is time for the British Government to get tough with the European Commission on rail freight liberalisation?

It is time for the British Government to get tough with the European Commission on rail freight liberalisation?

‘It is in the interests of the UK Government to support our industry by pressing the case for the complete liberalisation of the rail market across Europe, technically, commercially and legally, with the minimum of delay.’ That is the conclusion of RFG after attending a consultation meeting on Friday 7 November 2008, where representatives of EU industry, regulators and government heard the first results of an EC-sponsored study into the progress on the liberalisation of the European rail freight market and what still needs to be done.

Continued here: http://www.multimodal.org.uk/htm/n20081110.169503.htm

2008-11: 3PLs need to improve service or lose business

Shippers have become chronically dissatisfied with their logistics service providers, according to John Pattullo, CEO of Ceva Logistics.

Story

Source: International Freighting Weekly

2008-11: Lars Källström of BMT reports on Case North West (A2)

Port of Gothenburg has now started the implementation of the new pre-notification system aiming at reducing waiting times for truckers at the gates. The new system which will be operational before summer 2009 automatically pushes information to the forwarder and the appointed driver when the container is ready for pick-up and automates the gate check-in procedures. The system is one of the building blocks in the port’s efforts to modernize its management systems. It will reduce pollution from waiting vehicles, increase the paid transport time for the trucker and reduce the administrative workload in the port.

SCA/Transforest have now equipped more than 140 railway wagons with RFID-tags for monitoring the transport of paper rolls between the manufacturing plant in Munksund and the port terminal in Holmsund. Banverket has installed two reading stations and the software company eBuilder has prepared the software for supervising the transport. The test installation is running in parallel to the conventional monitoring which links the plant with Transforest as the company’s logistics service provider. The aim is to enhance this information with up-to-date information on the actual composition of the train in order to plan the unloading and prepare for any deviations from the planned schedule. Some hardware problems now seem to have been solved. The software is gradually being adapted to the demands of the transport chain managers. When both software and hardware are considered to be stable, the system will be integrated with the logistics management system  of Transforest. This is scheduled to happen in the first quarter of 2009

The focus on the practical problems around the implementation in Göteborg and in SCA/Transforest has delayed the in-depth evaluation of the Freightwise Framework (FWF). None of the cases cover the whole transport chain. They both focus on status reports and deviations from the planned schedule.  However, there is nothing which contradicts the approach proposed in FWF, although in practice some support may be needed to guide the user.

2008-11: Ainhoa Puebla of the Port of Gijon writes about the progress in Case H South West

Technical specifications of the CTIC´s prototype have been delivered to Logit. The goal of this new task is to share the information gathered in other phases of the project and, together with the technical description of the FreightWise tool, allow the connectivity with their D2D application. This connectivity will be done by means of web services and xml messages.

Recently the ArcelorMittal R&D team has been testing the current prototype in order to control its behaviour under real conditions, with a set of data provided by the Logistics Department of the company. At the same time, the connection with INTRRA is being analyzed too, to evaluate the real possibilities of the module.

2008-11: FREIGHTWISE CD-Rom Available Soon

A CD-Rom containing publicly available FREIGHTWISE deliverables is being developed.  The template is ready now and public deliverables will be loaded on to it.  The aim is to be able to distribute it after the conference in December.  The CD will provide a handy format to view deliverables. A second CD will be issued next year when more deliverables have been completed.