Transportation sector industry trends

Sustainability

To achieve sustainable mobility is a necessary goal to address the risks of congestion, pollution and climate change in the wake of the increased transport volumes. Businesses respond by reconsidering the viability of global supply chains, shifting the mix of transport modes and increasing the utilization of transport equipment. The threat of hitherto external costs of transport being internalized, the necessity to respond to the concerns of communities and shippers, as well as the increasing regulatory compliance costs are the economic drivers of change.

Transparency

Transparency not only implies the ability of shippers to track & trace  consignments, a service offered by many logistics service providers today, but also the capability to continuously measure the performance of  logistics service providers and to compare these indicators with that of the industry. Initiatives of businesses in the transport sector will not only respond to regulatory safety and security requirements but also to satisfy the requirements of traders and shippers.

Competitiveness

The structure of Europe's transportation industry is highly competitive and diversified. Transport companies will need to streamline internal processes and invest in automation and IT in order to keep rising costs under control. Streamlining operations and realizing cost savings in the fragmented logistics industry will have to be achieved through vertical and horizontal cooperation as well as M&A activities.

PARADIGMA and the Transportation Sector

PARADIGMA develops multi modal and co-modal transport chain pilot projects to assess the commercial and technical feasibility of combining different modes for cargo movements. A means to this end consists in designing lean, reliable and flexible supply chains. Using publicly available funding programs PARADIGMA forms consortia, delimits the scope of the project, support the design and implementation of the prototype and measures the performance of the pilot phase.

Identifying opportunities for new transport relations, PARADIGMA provides operational market information for transport service providers. PARADIGMA collects, analyses and interprets trade & transport statistics to identify current and expected demand, uses market segmentation to spot strategically attractive opportunities and supports the identification of leads, approaching selected traders and carriers.

Supporting the drive to streamline operations in an effort to cut costs, PARADIGMA analyses the existing business processes using proven methodologies, participates in the organizations goal setting exercise, manages the required changes and implements performance measurement systems. Benefits that accrue to the organization include cost efficient, robust and flexible business processes. A continuous performance monitoring system, increasing the transparency of the services.

Traffic planning with an emphasis on measuring actual traffic and cargo movements; making efficient use of available information combining and consolidating otherwise heterogeneous data to build an empirical foundation for traffic models.

Concept and prototype development of an innovative data collection process for the European Road Freight statistics using web services to connect transport management systems and on-board systems to seamlessly feed transport related information to the survey.