Did you know that? Today in France, 90% of goods pass by road. While some countries know how to take advantage of rail freight, especially Germany, which has seen a 40% increase in traffic in ten years. How did they do it?

Indeed, this decline is not irreversible: the integration of digital technology by incumbent operators has contributed greatly to this development by allowing them to optimize the use of equipment and the network.

In addition, the operational challenges, which concern both operators, shippers and wagon owners, are major: it is a question of responding to the even more demanding pressures of end customers, both in terms of services and competitiveness, by optimizing the use of fleets.

So why is rail freight still the least attractive mode of transport today despite its digitalization?

A traceability deficit

There is an enormous lack of visibility in rail transport, a constraint that is very unacceptable since shippers have little or no real-time monitoring information to manage the flow with the risk of some cars being temporarily “lost” in the wild. On the other hand, when they benefit from tracking, it is not always instantaneous or digitized to be able to easily exploit the data.

However, the digitalization of rail freight activity, materialized by the traceability of the transport infrastructure and its cargo, benefits all actors involved in the value chain:

• Freight operators will thus be able to align the transport offer with real needs, but also to monitor certain key indicators in real time (temperature, shocks, weight) in order to have better visibility on the conditions of the wagons.
• Operators are therefore adapting to shippers' demands, in order to offer them a tailor-made offer, which represents an undeniable gain for shippers.
• Shippers, for their part, can monitor their cargo and anticipate possible delivery delays and impacts on their theoretical rotation with their end customer.
• For wagon owners, traceability is a way to anticipate breakdowns and therefore maintenance operations, in addition to being able to better manage the provision of wagons thanks to a perfect knowledge of their geographical location as well as their condition.

Traceability and transport visibility are therefore strategic assets for all rail players, so why is it not enough to make rail freight “attractive”?

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Railway visibility but still partial

While visibility on the road is very widespread, today there are very few visibility platforms that provide transport visibility in the rail sector.

Rail transport visibility is based on the tracking of a wagon and the GPS messages it emits. This car is then taken as a representative of the entire train. But this is not enough: this in fact poses monitoring performance problems with few messages and the possibility of having data holes. Tracking can also be completely wrong if the car selected turns out to be not part of the train to be followed.

In the rail sector, the need to improve the real-time monitoring of trains is therefore still a very high priority. The actors want to have visibility of their trains as instantly as possible from the moment they leave the departure station to the arrival at the final destination.

How Everysens puts the light back on your cars

At Everysens, the promotion of rail transport and the attractiveness of this mode is part of our DNA. Everysens has developed a transport TMS in order to allow shippers and forwarders to meet all their transport management challenges, but in a different way than with a traditional generic TMS.

Everysens offers the first collaborative, predictive and real-time TMS on the market. This platform digitizes a set of transport processes, simplifies exchanges and decision support thanks to IoT and AI technologies.

To respond to this lack of visibility in rail transport, Everysens has put into production a calculation of the position of the convoy based on all the cars. This improvement allows us to detect alerts as early as possible (delay, delayed car, etc.).

Thanks to our IoT expertise and the interoperability of our platform on all sensors on the market, we can have the convoy calculation engine that is most adapted to IoT sensors on the market and therefore the most efficient.

Understanding railway use cases and mainly the difference between the complete train and the isolated wagon, which allows us to have the convoy calculation engine best suited to the needs of shippers.

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Want to learn a bit more? Plan a meeting with our team.