by Walther Ploos van Amstel
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 …
SmartDeliveries is a city-wide delivery rounds optimization system aiming at leveraging city traffic information to optimise professional vehicle rounds. This system has been developed as part of the OptimodLyon project in Lyon (F). One of the key features of the system is to integrate information of short and longer term expected mobility demand.
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 …
HelloFresh starts several innovations in fulfilment. In collaboration with FoodLogica, an Amsterdam startup in the field of sustainable logistics, the meal box service starts this month with a pilot project for delivering meals with refrigerated cargo bikes in Amsterdam. Additionally Hello Fresh offers customers the option to follow the delivery route from one half hour …
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 …
City logistics is becoming more finely meshed and more frequent. The transport of freight in cities with heavy freight vehicles and light commercial vehicles leads to congestion, a poor air quality, noise pollution, and incidents. The maximum loading volume of heavy freight vehicles and light commercial vehicles is rarely needed for urban freight.
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 …