by Walther Ploos van Amstel
The European Union is working on the further liberalisation of road transport by logistics service providers. The question is whether the further liberalisation of shippers transport on own account would not be more effective and yield better results.
Collaboration is standard practice in many supply chains, yet transaction costs often make it too expensive even so. Countless blog posts talk about the need for collaboration in the transport sector, in wholesale, in retail and with web stores.
Online shopping isn’t creating more congestion – and it won’t do that even when the number of web-store deliveries doubles to 200 million in 2020. But that doesn’t stop my neighbors from complaining all over social media about the increasing number of delivery vans in the street.
Countless books and articles have been written about urban distribution centers, logistics decoupling points, city hubs and urban consolidation centers. Every self-respecting European city has been the scene of such initiatives – the one more successful than the other, but all highly subsidized in any case. What can we learn from those initiatives? The best …
More and more companies are offering their customers delivery options. CoolBlue offers “Ordered today, delivered tonight” service, for example. In the construction sector, it’s: “Ordered today, delivered to the site between 7 and 9 tomorrow morning” – unless you’d rather pick up your package at the pick-up point yourself tonight. Agreed is agreed. Customers expect precision-guided …
Local government is one of the largest employers in the Netherlands, with departments and services across hundreds of sites in a municipality. Every day, these sites are supplied with printer paper, catering, maintenance products, cleaning items, paving and much, much more. These sites also produce substantial waste streams on a daily basis. The supply and …
The objective of the EU-funded SAILOR project is to develop real-time solutions to the matching problems of parcel delivery companies and the final customer, shortening routing distance as well as increase first-time deliveries and reverse logistics in the last mile. The final goal of SAILOR is to improve cost efficiency and decrease congestions and pollutions …
Clean and sustainable cities are appealing places to live, to work, to enjoy life, and – not least – to invest in. I live right in the very center of Amsterdam and look out over the bustling square in front of Central Station. Every day, around the clock, trucks and delivery vans drive past my …
With the rise of e-commerce, consumer preferences have grown increasingly important in the formerly business-oriented parcel-delivery market. Large e-commerce players, as well as various start-ups, have identified last-mile services as a key differentiator. The variety of delivery options and the perceived quality of the delivery service are major decision-making criteria for online customers and hence …
Carriers send their drivers out on the road with a set of strict transport orders. Transport planners specify exactly which route the driver is to take. But is that really so smart? With traffic being so uncertain, who is in the best position to make the best decisions: the planner at his desk or the …