Our Purpose: Bringing Transportation in Sync with the World.

Everyone needs purpose in their life: A north star, a raison d’etre, a compelling vision. At Transporeon we searched carefully for our mantra with internal soul searching, external interviews, strategic exploration and a series of workshops.

It meant a lot to us to find a purpose that would answer two questions:

• how we earn the privilege of employing close to 1300 talented and passionate people

• why we deserve the trust of so many customers (1400 shippers & 145000 carriers)

Our work re-confirmed our conviction that transportation is essential, it’s the magic tissue that keeps the economy going. And yet it is flawed. The transportation market is structurally inefficient and supply and demand come into equilibrium only very slow, there is considerable ‘waste’ in the processes that constrain efficiency and it is not yet enabled by the ‘close to perfect’ digital support we are surrounded by in other parts of our lives. So, one could say on many levels and in many ways, what happens in transportation is not in-sync with our reality – with our world.

We found, our purpose, our raison d’etre:

Bringing Transportation in Sync with the World.

This realization, this setting of our purpose, all happened ‘before’: before the pandemic, before the warin Ukraine, before the energy crisis, before the cost of living crisis, before the blockage in the Suez Canal … before many of us truly recognised just how vital transportation is to the flow of goods, life sustaining goods, globally and the chaos caused when transportation is compromised.

So many things in today’s transportation market are out of sync with the world and not yet as good as they could or should be: Idle assets, empty runs, lack of dynamic capacity, unnecessary waiting times and absence of collaboration are adding up to significant economic damage. In addition, lack of investment in digitisation has led to high administrative efforts, an excess of manual tasks, emotive decision-making, and a dearth of actionable insights. As if that’s not enough, there is also the ecological damage caused by an un-measured and un-contained level of CO₂ emissions. On all levels, micros and macro transportation seems to be slow in syncing with our reality.

The good news is that this trend can be reversed. It is feasible to bring transportation in sync with the world and deploy the digital support readily available, to create efficiencies in transportation execution to positively impact the economy, individual business results and the environment.

We believe that bringing transportation in sync with the world relies on three primary components:

COLLABORATION

It is imperative enterprise works together to realise the economies available. There is no need for trucks to drive hundreds of empty miles to pick up their next load when a truck of the same equipment type is likely unloading around the corner. It is time for shippers and carriers to connect with one another, agree on common business standards, collaborate and embrace a platform that provides network-wide interoperability.

Connecting shippers, load recipients, service providers, brokers, forwarders and asset-based carriers is integral to creating a collaborative transportation community. Applying common standards and enabling interoperability will give all players new business opportunities whilst creating economies in their operations. This collaboration gives the transportation market the resilience and agility it needs to continue to respond to changing market dynamics and unforeseen events.

AUTOMATION

The use of excel spreadsheets, manual searches and endless browsing for routes, capacity and rates must become part of the past. This inefficient administrative burden is burning through valuable resources and failing to deliver the optimum outcome.

It is time to pivot away from collecting data from the transactions executed and start generating transactions from the data available. Automated data-driven decision making within a collaborative, connected network using optionality, past patterns, present data and future predictions, will bring transportation in sync with the world and create that magic tissue necessary to optimise both economic and ecological outcomes.

REAL-TIME INSIGHTS

Control is at the heart of optimising one’s ability to make the right decisions in a timely fashion, and control is all about having the necessary insights at your fingertips. Whether it is visibility into CO2 emissions, access to spot rates, an overview of capacity or simple ETAs for a transport, real-time insights combined with execution capabilities enable enterprise to predict future states, intervene in real-time when things go wrong and take control of the efficiency of their operations.

In a recently published article in the July 2022 edition of Logistics Management with the Title “State of Logistics 2022: Out of sync” the author John D. Schulz points out that in the last 2 years when global supply chains have been facing unprecedented volatility and challenge in the market “Rather than rethinking logistics to get better outcomes, the priority seemed to be a rush to get any outcome at nearly any price.” Likely this was out of necessity rather than desire. But the fact remains that this modus operandi will continue to undermine the state of this industry and the time for change and digitisation is now.

Similarly Jeff Berman wrote in Logistics Management a reaction to the above article “Despite the current ‘out of sync’ challenges, logistics and supply chain march on.”

Bringing transportation in sync with the world relies on a change in approach and mentality. The challenge at hand is not within a single organisation, freight challenges occur in between companies, this is where the problem needs to be addressed … for all players. As such, embracing digital tools, collaborating with each other, automating decision-making and putting real-time insights to use are imperative to building that connectivity and inter-operability in order to build that magic tissue.

At Transporeon, all of these critical components are embedded within the Transporeon Transportation Management Platform on which a diverse portfolio of freight applications have been built for a diverse network of participants. Ambidexterity is the name of the game here, meaning the platform serves all participants in the network equally: shippers, brokers, logistics service providers, asset-based carriers as well as goods recipients. This is underpins our purpose and our total focus on digitising and transforming transportation for all parties.

A key component of a robust transportation strategy is resilience and agility. The 33rd Annual State of Logistics (SoL)* report supports this observation: “Logistics must be permanently about embedding “resilience and agility” into its capabilities before shifting its focus back to cost minimisation and efficiency.” What better way to insert these characteristics than to embrace a platform which provides a vast network for collaboration with functionally-rich applications to address all aspects of freight logistics across the supply chain.

If you want to ensure your transportation strategy is in sync with the world, connect with us www.transporeon.com.