The transport chain is being digitalized - a win for the companies, customers and the environment
Our community is being more and more digitalized and also the logistics needs to keep up. Decisions in principle in order to speed up the development have been made by both the Finnish Government and within the EU, and an electronic information flow has long been prioritized within Scandic Trans. An important question when it comes to digitalization is how the information can be better utilized in order to direct the flow of goods. Finland is a country with long distances and therefore higher transport costs than the average within the EU. Lowering the costs would mean a lot for the Finnish companies’ competitiveness. The vision for 2025 is that Finland has managed to use its geographical location and with the help of digitalization measures has become a hub also for international freight transports. Finland is number one in the world when it comes to promoting the mind-set mobility as a service. It is important that this know-how is used within the freight logistics. – The transport capacity is not used to its fullest today, nor nationally or internationally – there is a lot of air in the transport, which is both expensive and ineffective. A lot of money could be saved by striving towards a maximally used loading space – something that in turn requires a booking system which is being updated in real-time, Stefan Nyholm, CEO for the company Nextlog in Mustasaari on the Finnish west coast, explains. The driving of empty trucks can be minimized, and the filling of the space maximized – something digitalization enables. – In the end it is about improving the profitability at the same time as saving the environment – a win-win situation for all parties, he states.
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The World Economic Forum has estimated the global benefit from digitalization of the logistics trade to 1 500 billion dollars and for the community to 2 400 billion dollar up until 2025. On EU-level it is estimated that the digitalization will lower the carbon dioxide emissions by 15-30 percent.
Nyholm is a former transport entrepreneur who soon 20 years ago became an IT entrepreneur because of their own need for an extensive transport and logistics system. Today Nextlog delivers its system LogiControl with related modules to Finnish transport companies, whose vehicles move around all of Europe. – We adopted the digitalization very early on and already in the beginning of 2000 had computers and modems with GPRS connections in our cars. A lot has happened since, Nyholm notes. LogiControl covers the whole process from order management to billing and follow-up, and is an excellent example of the true Ostrobothnia spirit ”we can do it ourselves”. The development has according to Nyholm accelerated the last five years and a lot of work now goes into integrating their own system with other systems. The goal is that the same data should not have to be inserted many times by different players. – This is the challenge – that there isn’t one single common standard, but several different formats. The systems do not communicate with each other, and it is the same within other trades. – In order to create integration between them it also requires that several parties cooperate, Nyholm continues. It can become very complex, especially when it involves intermodal transports and many different players. Robert Nyman works as counsellor and expert for the association Finlands Yrkestrafik r.f., which was founded in