In the last two years, a whole host of events have led logistics management to evolve by leaps and bounds, and the digitization of route planning and slot management has become a strategic point for advanced transport management.
The high levels of uncertainty generated by the pandemic, soaring inflation, disruption of transportation flows and the war crisis in Eastern Europe, among other aspects, are causing supply chains to focus much of their attention on planning as a key tool to face new scenarios, taking advantage of the digital transformation of the sector.
Through new planning capabilities, logistics and transport managers are trying to optimize their ability to cope with the shortage of supply in some logistics services.
Similarly, all players in supply chains are seeking to improve the fluidity of their logistics processes, which have been subject to various interruptions in the last two years, in a clear trend towards more resilient and agile models.
Transformation of the logistics sector
In response to these new needs in logistics and transportation management, FIELDEAS has enhanced its planning capabilities and developed a slot management module for its visibility platform.
FIELDEAS Track and Trace has been transforming the industry for years through the most flexible model in the market, offering tracking capabilities for multimodal transport, which, together with a set of advanced features such as electronic delivery notes, eCMR, visual picking, IoT sensor integration, among others, allows to manage scenarios from long-distance transport, up to the control of the last mile.
Our network offers connection capacity with more than 10,000 trucking companies. and has an absolutely dynamic incorporation mechanism for new carriers, which allows them to connect new companies within days, offering a totally flexible model, through its API, connecting the supplier’s telematics or through its App. A fully advanced solution that allows complete management of the process.
In the maritime field, the capture of information from port information systems allows us to monitor up to 80% of maritime shipments, enabling global tracking for multimodal shipments.
In addition to these capabilities, in 2021, rail transport tracking was added, a modality in which its solution is capable of providing real-time information at the railcar level and calculating estimated arrival times through specific algorithms.
As a natural step in this evolution, our focus in 2022 will be on improving planning, applied to all types of transport and all processes in the supply chain.
The planning capabilities enable you to perform a advanced management of your transportation needs, have time estimates available to share with its customers from the very beginning of the process, as well as optimize all the processes that are part of the chain and, especially, one of the major concerns of the sector, waiting times.
According to Óscar López, CEO of the company, “Both contractual and regulatory pressure have put logistics grid management at the center of companies’ concerns and the availability of an interconnected management model, together with the predictive algorithms offered by FIELDEAS Track and Trace, are enabling companies to make very substantial savings at all levels, both in direct and indirect costs”.
Route planning
All actors in the chain, Shippers, Operators, Carriers and consignees, can benefit from more efficient route planning. From long-haul scenarios to the last mile, they can benefit from the advanced planning model.
The use of advanced planning models makes it possible to perform manual planning or to automate this process by means of a base template definition model.
Optimization is equally relevant, allowing the user to establish the most efficient sequence of operations, considering in any case the restrictions that apply to each process.
1- Advanced manual planner offering dynamic routing models integrating capacity controls for process optimization.
2- Automatic route generator, based on pre-established business rules, which simplifies this activity and saves more than 50% of the time spent on these tasks.
3- Route optimizer, which calculates the optimal sequence of operations to be performed by the user, considering all time and/or capacity constraints.
4- Integrated media allocation process, for a direct launch of the route to the tracking module.
Slots Management
The current tensions suffered by the transport logistics sector, with a sharp increase in fuel costs or lack of professionals, among others, are leading transport operators to try to fine-tune their flows through different measures, among which the following stand out reduction of waiting times. This demand is being reflected from the regulatory point of view, with laws or bills that seek to focus on this situation.
The FIELDEAS Track and Trace slot management module directly connects all the actors in the chain and does so in real time, allowing optimization scenarios that would be unthinkable in any other model. The system offers advanced capabilities such as
1- Slot request by carrier based on objective planning.
2- Approval flows from logistics centers.
3- Monitoring of the connected planning in real time.
4- Automatic alerts based on deviations from planning.
5- Graphic supervision of waiting areas and downtime.
6- Dynamic reassignment of loading/unloading points.
Railroad visibility
Rail transport is a mode with a very low modal share in Europe and has the potential to gain market share in the coming years and achieve the established sustainability objectives.
In this sense, the actors in the chain require visibility and monitoring similar to those already available to road transport.
However, visibility at the convoy level is not sufficient, so the focus is on achieving tracking at the wagon and order level.
The model provided by FIELDEAS Track and Trace combines information from third-party systems along with IoT to achieve complete visibility of the entire process and provide real-time predictions to your customers.
For this purpose, the following are used:
1- Proprietary machine learning algorithms, which allow the dynamic generation of rail transport routes and the autonomous learning of the system.
2- Advanced route planning which incorporates all the information learned by the system in previous routes.
3- Real-time tracking at the railcar level based on information from third-party systems or by integrating information through IoT devices for advanced tracking models with temperature control, etc.
4- Calculation of estimated arrival times through specifically designed algorithms and automatic feedback.
