04/11/2023 | 5 min
Transporeon NEXT saw the online launch of three exciting new products at the end of March. CEO Stephan Sieber and CMO Georgia Leybourne were joined by:
You can watch a recording of this event now and see for yourself what our experts had to say.
These famous words from Churchill neatly sum up the theory that from adversity comes opportunity. They were the opening remarks from our CEO Stephan Sieber who joined the online launch, while on a visit to our teams in Hyderabad, India. Sieber pointed out that adversity and crisis are very familiar terms for the transportation sector, with multiple challenges including labour scarcity, unpredictable supply chain events, and carbon emissions regulation and compliance.
To demonstrate the reality of these challenges, Sieber pointed out that 30% of current European road transportation drivers will retire by 2026, with younger drivers entering the industry at a rate that is four to seven times slower than the rate of those departing. Rail, ocean and air all have similar labour issues.
Regulatory and compliance requirements are set to become leading topics on the transportation agenda, and for very good reason. There is a widespread acceptance that emissions targets are unlikely to be met without significant, life-changing worldwide action. The phrase ‘carbon accounting’ will pass into common budgeting parlance this decade, while the EU Mobility Package will be supplemented by new cabotage rules, not common to every country.
However, Churchill’s quote chimes perfectly with Transporeon’s core ethos, which is to leverage these tough times to build a more resilient business. To emphasise his point, Sieber also quoted F1 motor racing legend Ayrton Senna: “You can’t overtake 15 cars when it’s sunny - but you can when it’s raining.”
In short, now is the time to exploit your company’s strengths and deploy Transporeon’s cutting-edge solutions in support.
Transporeon’s answers? Automation, real-time insights and collaboration.
Via our four application hubs (Freight Sourcing, Transport Execution, Dock and Yard Management, Freight Audit and Payment) and our three data hubs (Sustainability, Visibility and Insights), we offer game-changing additions to facilitate and optimise your transportation processes.
Transport Operations is our single, easy-to-use interface to move, manage and monitor your transport flows, all backed up by real-time visibility. It applies to all transport modes, and therefore serves the needs of all modal teams.
Transport Operations works by harnessing the power of our transport network. It will allow you to manage multimodal transports more efficiently and to devise the easiest, most sustainable way of getting loads from A to B. By seamless collaboration with our ecosystem, you ensure bump-free lifecycles for all shipments, however diverse the profile (LTL, FTL, groupage). In addition, a self-service shipment and routing guide, set to your own preferences, enables you to fully automate your assignments strategy, with both spot and contract included.
Nick Poels pointed out that we are adapting to the upside-down world that transportation has become. In the ‘old world’ 80% of events were predictable and 20% exceptional, those numbers are now reversed, and the industry has become accustomed to it. Across the industry as a whole, we spend 25% of our time searching for information, which means any team must be able to efficiently deal with exceptions. However, we already know that transportation lags behind the curve of other industries when it comes to adapting to digital advancements.
Transport Operations is highly configurable, with features arranged according to your own preferences and criteria. They include a chat portal with customers; an exceptions engine to provide alerts and context to help you when such matters arise; and full visibility on costs, performance, SKUs, documents, and much more. This user-centric approach ensures this product’s capability across your organisation, whether your role is as transport planner, logistics manager, head of HR or, of course, the customer.
The paperless revolution just got a whole lot more viable with Digital Transport Documents. This innovative product replaces sign-on-glass, by documenting your activities digitally and electronically. This facilitates greater visibility and faster, smoother efficiencies, while reducing paper output and enabling manual resources to serve the business elsewhere. With Digital Transport Documents, everyone benefits, and everyone can see ALL documentation. The shipper creates the documents, the driver authenticates and signs, and the receiver confirms.
The motivation for Digital Transport Documents is straightforward, revealed Gerry Daalhuisen. By 2026, the eCMR will be mandatory across the EU. Transporeon's latest innovation from the Dock & Yard Management Hub revolutionises the documentation journey by digitising the creation, management, sharing, signing and approval of transport documents. Digital adoption has been previously very hard to achieve in the Dock and Yard sector, due to technical constraints and multiple parties often trying to align disparate solutions for different customers and loads. From now on, all can be transparently united under a single platform solution, which represents a real breakthrough.
There have been other barriers to paperless developments up to now. Legal complexities must address all of these, across domestic and international boundaries, with data and privacy also requiring reconciliation. Such innovations cost time and money and the logistics industry has not had the resources or the bandwidth to treat the effort as a priority.
However, progress is being made. Alongside the eCMR requirements, eDelivery note initiatives are advancing, while digital cleaning certificates for tank trailers and digital pallet notes for pallet exchange providers are expected to come into the mainstream. Most importantly, the EU Commission is supporting and investing in an eFTI process, expected to form a large database for all transport information, backed up by a legal framework on sharing protocols.
Digital Transport Documents is not just about creating a PDF. It is about full interconnection between partners – with electronic signatures, and images for monitoring and proving processes visible in real-time to all parties. A single platform enables you to draw on all existing connections, on all sides of the Transporeon platform. Digital Transport Documents can also be connected to any third-party ERP or TMS, as preferred.
Carbon Visibility is an important step on the long, but vital road to decarbonising freight transport. Jakob Muus explained that this new functionality will incorporate primary data into the calculation, making it more accurate and reliable.
Signed-up members of our Carbon Intelligence Mastermind Community will already know that emissions are grouped into three categories:
Scope 1 is your own company’s emissions
Scope 2 emissions are those indirectly related to your business. So while you heat your premises, for instance, the fossil fuel used to provide that heat was burned elsewhere
Scope 3 is everything else upstream and downstream in your supply chain – including transport emissions.
Jakob Muus reminded us that scopes 1 and 2 are relatively easy to manage. For instance, you can easily access your own fuel bills to calculate CO2 costs.
Scope 3 is much harder, because you simply don’t have enough knowledge of the modes and types of transport and the journeys undertaken at this external level of your supply chain.
This is where Transporeon comes in and why we are number one in freight transport sustainability. We have spent 22 years building an unrivalled library of data infrastructure between carriers and shippers. By harvesting that data, we can help you monitor and reduce scope 3 emissions. For example, we can identify very quickly what part of a carrier's scope 1 emissions are a shipper's scope 3, then calculate and allocate the accurate CO2 measures to each load and provide certified reports.
With four solutions to suit your precise needs, Carbon Visibility enables precise emissions allocations for every single transport – now and in the future. More than a SaaS, it includes DaaS (Data as a Service) opportunities for shippers, carriers and forwarders, all designed to inform and integrate, so that correct emissions can be measured and allocated. For companies whose data is not already uploaded to the Transporeon platform, a flat file upload is also available.
All of the above lead to a higher quality of data. And data quality is vitally important, because it allows precision accuracy in carbon accounting. A carbon accountant needs kilometers, tons, modes and vehicles before they can measure. Without that precise information, the accountant is required to default to the negative, which almost always means an overcalculation. Overcalculation means more carbon cost, and more carbon cost means more financial cost. It focuses our minds on achieving accurate measurements.
Carbon Visibility enables you to take that next vital step towards precision accounting, because for the first time it uses Primary Data, in addition to Default and Modelled Data. It is automated, it’s accredited in accordance with the GLEC Framework, and it is precise. Plus, there is a service model to fit your business, whether shipper, carrier or forwarder.
Better data means lower reported emissions and savings in euros, dollars and pounds. While there may be no prize today, there certainly will be tomorrow.
If you would like to find out more about the newly launched products and innovations, the recording of the full online event of Transporean NEXT is now available for you is now available for you to watch on demand.
Discover the new solutions and innovations that make Transporeon’s Transportation Management Platform your one stop shop to move, manage and monitor freight globally.
Want to learn more about our new solutions? Fill out the form below and we will get in touch to let you know how you can upgrade your business.
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