A plea for a logic of performance in rail logistics
Renting a wagon costs a company between €10K and €15K per year. The investment is substantial, and yet the operations manager in charge of optimizing it generally only has fragmented and weakly automated information on the behavior of their wagon.
“How many trips did it make? How many days did it spend on maintenance? How much did this wagon bring me in terms of goods carried?” These are all logistical KPIs that must be monitored regularly.
We often say: ”When you love, you don't count”. However, the saying is difficult to apply to logistics and railways.
To remain competitive and gain in efficiency, rail definitely needs performance statistics.
Any Operations Director, Supply Chain Manager or Optimization Project Manager should use a reliable and automated business intelligence tool in order to achieve their goals.
Outdated and time-consuming rail reporting tools
Railway companies and shippers have implemented several methods to collect data on their fleet of wagons and their use:
- Purchased train paths and consignment notes are often compiled in an Excel file.
- Emails are regularly sent to notify of train progress.
- Partners were called to inquire about traffic, the availability of wagons and the smooth running of operations.
- Physical inventories are carried out by a person directly on the field.
This data can then be used for reporting. It is used to determine different logistics KPIs: we can thus calculate the service rate, the average number of rotations, or even the loading rate of the factory.
However, if such reporting has already happened to you, you have probably already wanted these data recovery methods to be automated.
Information is scattered or not up to date. Sometimes they're just not centralized.
This is often the case, for example, for the time spent in the workshop.
In the absence of reliable indicators, setting up an optimization policy is difficult. But once you have activity statistics, you can start to adapt your practices and deepen your performance logic.
Anything that can be measured, improves!
At Everysens, we believe that everything that can be measured improves.
To make progress, you must first take stock of the situation. By measuring your performance through dashboards, you will be able to analyze your operations more accurately and increase your operational efficiency.
Anything that can be measured improves, and anything that improves can become profit! The lack of centralization of data is a source of financial loss.
Logistics is a business where margins are limited and there are many players. Regularly measuring performance is therefore crucial.
In this context, IoT technology is an opportunity because it considerably increases the quantity of data available for analysis. Our logistics optimization platform centralizes this data in real time and extracts reliable performance statistics from it, updates automatically, and adapts to your business.
An utopia? Well no.
A concrete example of logistics KPI: the utilization rate
Our platform calculates the usage rate of fleets. Parameterized according to the customer's business realities, this indicator makes it possible to know the real use of the fleet, and to identify the phases of the life of the wagon that require optimization. Statistics make it possible both to de-escalate debates with service providers and to focus on solutions.
The granularity of the indicator allows you to start with simple optimizations, but whose effect is a snowball. Returning a wagon to use after a retention period is a small-scale action. But combined, these actions make it possible to reduce the unavailability rate. And why not resize the fleet! Huge savings in perspective...
Adapt your indicators to your business challenges
The idea is therefore not to create a limitless KPI mill, but to have indicators adapted to your job and your challenges. You need to know what works well or not, and why, in order to be able to implement best practices.
Elisabeth Briand, Supply Chain Director at Conforama, confirms it:
“The objective is to spend more time on improving the indicator than on how it is calculated.”
Want to learn a bit more? Plan a meeting with our team.
