FIT - Assessing the Potential for Rationalising Road Freight Operations
Overview
Background & policy context:
A key element of the UK government's Sustainable Distribution strategy has been the Transport KPI initiative. This initiative has been designed to help companies benchmark the efficiency of their road transport operations against a standard set of key performance indicators (KPIs). Several 'synchronised audits' of fleet activity have been undertaken since 1997, including three in the food supply chain. The main objective of this project was to develop software tools that can be applied to the large transport KPI databases to assess opportunities for rationalising road freight operations.
T
wo forms of rationalisation were investigated: more efficient routing of vehicles on multiple-drop rounds and a reduction in the empty running of lorries through improved back loading. The tools were tested on the results of the 2002 transport KPI survey conducted in the food supply chain, which covered 53 vehicle fleets, comprising roughly 3500 vehicles which travelled 1.4 million km over the 48-hour survey period. The project also surveyed users and suppliers of commercial vehicle telematics systems (VTS) to examine the extent to which these systems were being used to collect and analyse KPI data.
Objectives:
- To define and specify the requirements for a software tool-kit;
- To develop a software tool-kit for use on the transport KPI database;
- To apply the tool-kit in an analysis of the transport KPI data to assess the potential for reducing the economic and environmental costs of road freight transport;
- To consider how the tool-kit might have to be adapted to distribution operations in other sectors;
- To examine the collection of KPI data by commercial road freight information systems;
- To investigate ways of combining the software tool-kit with real-time road freight information systems to identify backloading and load consolidation opportunities on a short-term basis.
Methodology:
Software toolkits have been developed to interface the transport KPI database with the Optrak vehicle routing package (for the route efficiency analysis) and with GIS modules in the SAS package (for the analysis of backloading opportunities) (objectives 1 and 2). The tools were tested in analyses of sample data drawn from the 2002 transport KPI survey in the food supply chain (objective 3). Although the tools are customised to the food transport KPI database, they could, with modest revision, be adapted to KPI surveys in other sectors employing similar methodology (objective 4). Telephone interviews were held 33 providers and 32 users of truck telematics services were undertaken which examined the potential for these services to collect operational data required for the calculation of transport KPIs and the nature, formatting, storage and analysis of data currently collected (objective 5). Discussions with operators of vehicle telematics systems and online freight exchanges indicated that the tool-kit lacks the necessary functionality for real-time load matching in a commercial environment. Software for the real-time monitoring and trading of backhaul capacity has now been developed and commercialised by other organisations (objective 6).
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