Cross-company cooperation for transport pooling
With exploding parcel shipment volumes and logistics competition from mail-order giants on the one hand, and declining newspaper subscription numbers and shrinking business sectors on the other: Both courier, express and parcel (CEP) service providers and media logistics companies are under enormous pressure to survive in the market. One possible approach is cross-company cooperation to pool transport. This requires digital solutions to plan routes efficiently and to coordinate and document the transfer of consignment data. This is the focus of the SMART MULTI-USE LOGISTIK (SML) research project, which aims to develop a cooperative logistics platform with dynamic route planning and open user interfaces for CO2-optimised delivery in collaboration with CEP service providers and media logistics companies in central Germany.
About the project
On the one hand, the cooperation approach offers opportunities for media logistics companies to expand their business areas and to participate in cross-regional courier business; on the other hand, CEP service providers can save on routes by delivering parcel shipments directly with the newspaper or postal service. The challenge is the existing heterogenous system landscape with closed process chains that have become established in CEP companies and consignment platforms. For cooperation, however, it must be possible to transfer data transparently at every point of the delivery process. This task is to be taken over by a central system platform which, in addition to linking the logistics systems involved, is also responsible for central optimisation across company boundaries.
This should make it possible to uniformly map and plan all processes across the company, from the creation of shipments in the web portal to their arrival to the warehouse and delivery, including mobile order processing and routing. Future-oriented technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence are used in the process. The use of electric vehicles by all cooperation partners and pooled primary operations also ensures a significantly reduced environmental impact.
The project started in May 2020 and is supported as part of the research programme “ICT for Electric Mobility: intelligent applications for mobility, logistics and energy” funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi).
In addition to consortium leader DAKO, the consortium consists of five media logistics companies (DDV Mediengruppe, Leipzig Logistik GmbH, MZZ Briefdienst GmbH, Mediengruppe Magdeburg, FUNKE Logistik), the parcel service provider United Parcel Service Deutschland S.à.r.l. & Co OHG (UPS), the pharmaceutical logistics company OPTI-TRANS, Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the University of Applied Sciences Erfurt.