Overview
The rise of transport flows in Europe affected negatively the reduction of GHG emissions achieved by the industry sector in recent years. A crucial issue for effectively reducing Greenhouse Gases is therefore to increase efficiency of transport activities and limit the mileage of goods transported by road.
In line with the call text of the PREDIT 3 Programme (theme 2, point 2.2) focusing on the “Logistics reorganization of loading points: study on possible reductions of goods mobility”, CRISTAL analysed in particular less-consuming logistics organizations.
The research aimed to present (first phase) a method for identifying reduction potentials in road transport (in terms of reduced kilometres driven) as well as to determine those structural elements that could further amplify this reduction. The method was tested in a second phase on two real cases brought by two industrial groups: the CAT Group and Yoplait.
The research focused on three different areas:
- the structure of logistics and production architectures (in particular the drivers of production sites’ de-specialisation)
- the operational aspects and tactics
- the information systems.
Funding
Results
The identified “axis of improvement” are
at strategic level:
- impacts, within the production-logistics framework, of a marginal “de-specialisation” of production sites (in order to bring transport flows closer)
- adjustments of logistics structures (localisation and number of loading/unloading points) in order to facilitate access to service providers
- coherent management of long-distance and distribution flows
at operational level
- reducing the impacts of increased frequencies
- reducing driven kilometres and number of stops
This is linked to the activity of bundling goods carried out by different providers for each supply chain.
at information system level
- the need of reliable on-board units (monitoring flows in frequency and volume) and predictive tools (reactive adaptation of resources)
The research demonstrated that identified areas of improvement could led to reduced GHG emissions. However, solutions are still too-expensive and current road transport costs do not encourage companies to make such investments. it was also evident that the increased number of depots and transhipment points is beneficial for the reduction of driven kilometres in road transport activities even if this reduction is not proportional to the number of warehouses created.