Stand B1
Transport Exchange Group creates and delivers real time decision making solutions for logistics and transportation businesses around the world. We provide the freight data aggregation and analysis tools relied upon to build businesses. With our public and private freight exchanges we are now, by some distance, the leading provider of managed freight exchange services for the UK road transport industry with successful exchanges now established in 5 countries.
With over 22,000 daily users, 43,500 vehicles and trading over 1.3 million movements worldwide per year, Transport Exchange Group has a proven track record of helping businesses to tackle some of the most common and difficult challenges facing the road transport industry.
These exchanges provide users with a platform to deal with the growing operational challenges of the industry. The platform consists of an online, real-time, user-friendly transaction and communication hub to help them grow and be profitable, despite increasingly tough operating conditions.
Emissions: why freight exchange will play a future role in the LCRS story
By Simon Bunegar, Transport Exchange
How efficient are the low carbon-emitting vehicles in your fleet? With the government calling for even tougher carbon reduction targets (it wants a reduction of 52 per cent by 2032), it’s a question that the Carbon Logistics Review, has brought into much sharper focus.
The scheme, which is UK’s largest, and is administered by the FTA has helped its 130 members, achieve, on average, a seven per cent reduction in C02 emissions between 2010 and 2015.
The collaborative initiative, which is free join, and easy for members to be a part of, (we know - as several of our members also belong to the LCRS) records the emission reductions of over 88,000 vehicles. That’s the majority of the UK’s liveried fleet. It provides support, encouragement and inspiration too for forward-thinking fleets, who go the extra mile to lower their carbon footprint.
Many of the developments it has inspired re highly successful; leading-edge aerodynamic features which improve efficiency; ‘Tall Boy’ trailers, which take payload capacity to another level, and a wide range of alternative fuels, which in some cases have cut C02 emissions by a whopping 60-per cent. The LCRS creates positive role models in sustainable freight circles, of which we can all be proud.
Based on the results coming from our members there is another area where technology can add great value to this endeavour, and could conceivably become part of the LCRS’s playbook in future years. These are freight exchange platforms, such as that provided by Transport Exchange Group,.
When Transport Exchange was created 17 years ago one of its founding principles was to minimise dead mileage and empty running in the freight sector, and reduce C02 emissions in the transport sector.
If a truck is carrying nothing but fresh air, as around 40% of journeys do, that represents a great opportunity to reduce pollution simply by carrying goods to nearby final destination – if needs be, someone else’s. by reducing empty running freight exchange platforms reduce carbon, N0X emissions and particulates.
The great benefit of modern information technology is that by aggregating information and analysing it deeply, it opens up the potential to re-invent long-standing business practices and make them more efficient, both operationally and environmentally
Every day, for instance, the Transport Exchange Group, generates 1,265 backloads for its 5,600 members. As their vehicles are already on the road, backhauls reduce the need for one-way trips pumping more unnecessary emissions into the atmosphere.
The interest in utilising return load systems is growing steadily. Transport Exchange’s virtual fleet grows year-on-year and now stands at over 43,000 vehicles, which means more and more return journeys are being created.
The emissions savings re impressive – in 2017 Last year, Transport Exchange members saved 17,792 tonnes of C02. Projections based on the first half of 2018, show this figure is climbing strongly.
But this only tells half of the story. Backloads not only lead to fewer journeys. Most importantly, they keep vehicles off the road. During a recent discussion with FTA we discovered that due to the relatively high average mileage of commercial vehicles compared to private journeys, a reduction of just 10% of commercial mileage would have the same effect as clearing one third of private cars off the road.
The potential financial savings for operators are significant, let alone the ability to make a major contribution towards achieving national emissions reductions targets.
For the best part of a century transport has operated in pretty much the same way, but the arrival of Big Data, the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain are opening up new ways of thinking about how to get goods from factory to front door, and will lead to a complete redesign of the way this industry operates.
Pioneering freight exchange platforms, which have been integrating telematics systems into their platforms for nearly two decades, are particularly well placed to capitalise on this new technology. They can take advantage of the intelligent sensors in vehicles, the RFID tags in pallets and in intelligent strips built into roadside infrastructure. They can gather data, extrapolate it and harvest it.
Across the whole industry, from manufacturers to households, we are seeing how data driven platforms will provide a level of real-time visibility that we have never seen before – enabling operators to truly maximise the capacity of a van or a truck anywhere and anytime. For logistics industry that’s the holy grail. As this technology has the potential to revolutionise the freight load consolidation landscape, it will of course lower the freight sector’s C02 emissions.
One very interesting development, which we are exploring now, is the use of Blockchain. This uses highly advanced technologies to create unalterable records, which provide ‘a single version of the truth’, enabling the contractor to see every detail of the van or truck belonging to the subcontractor carrying the goods. They’ll be able to see details such as its payload capacity, when it was last serviced and its emission count. This will enable better load consolidation and will make it easier for environmentally-minded operators to select sub-contractors, who are truly dedicated to decarbonisation.
The future for this industry is exciting, as technologies re developed that allow operators to take a far more holistic view of their operations. They will have a clear and accurate view of every journey and be continually getting recommendations and suggestions from AI that help them to optimise efficiency as matter of course.
Perhaps in just a few years time these ground-breaking technologies will be an integral part of supporting the world-class innovations that LCRS members have worked so hard to bring to light, and be an integral part of the whole process?
