
If you walked around the city of Leipzig, Germany last week you would have seen Uber cars, bicycle riders in business attire, BMW i3 test riders in town. This is the 2014 annual summit of the International Transport Forum in action.This event brought together policy makers, scientists, as well as practitioners to provide a platform for a think tank for the global transportation community.
More than 1.100 participants came together over 3 days to meet and discuss questions of Transport in a Changing World. And the factors of change with an impact on transport are plenty:
At this summit, I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion on Constructing Supply Chains of the Future: How Shifts in Global Economic Balance Affect Transport. The topic of the discussion expanded across many dimensions:
The participants of the panel were of high caliber – with representatives from the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, and Germany, some of the leading country in the Logistics performance index of the World Bank. Participants from the corporate businesses included:
What all participants were in agreement with was that we are seeing massive changes in Supply Chains driven by new business realities and several global questions were discussed:
What can help solve the issues?
It was agreed by all that this can only be achieved through a systematic approach to ensure transparency, visibility and reliability. Governments, regulators and corporations need to collaborate and cooperate, and IT can orchestrate that process. This was showcased in the example of the Smart Port Logistics project at the Hamburg Port Authority, where the scheduling of hinterland transports via truck is synchronized with loading and unloading container vessels and steering traffic flows into the city of Hamburg can be controlled, e.g. by early advice to stop at a parking lot 100 km before Hamburg.
The conclusion was that the expectations are high for an integrated solution. Supply Chains of the future need:
In other words it is critical to first understand the business challenges before you can take the appropriate action. And information is key to evolve supply chains into demand networks for speed and customer centricity.
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