This year 2020, marked by Covid-19, has further highlighted the need for excellent collaboration between internal (plants, steering centres, Business Units) and external (railway companies) players, particularly with regard to transport visibility. The slowdown of activities and the complexity of exchanges between each transport player (teleworking) have demonstrated the crucial role played by the digitalisation of the Supply Chain of major industrialists.

It is against this backdrop of global crisis that Arkema decided to invest in a visibility and transport optimization solution. After conducting a series of pilots in the first half of 2020, Arkema chose the Everysens solution to track its European fleet of 500 railcars.

Mr. Jean-Marc Viallatte, Vice President Supply Chain Group of Arkema explains: "We are carrying out at Arkema a profound transformation of our supply chain. In our business sector, chemicals, supply chain is a strategic function. The digitalization of our supply chain is one of the key axes to increase the quality of our customer service; it is our top priority. We wanted to be more proactive in the management of rail transport, which is essential to our customers for safe and responsible transport".

Arkema's objective is clear: to be able to steer its rail activities in an agile and refined manner. Everysens provides a real-time update of ETAs, giving us visibility on the current and projected availability of our railcars. The specificity of this project lay in the location of isolated wagons. This tracking is still complex in rail logistics with partial information for national flows and almost non-existent for flows crossing several countries. The reactivity for incident management is therefore limited.

"We have therefore tested, through trials, several solutions on the market in order to validate the benefit for our customers. Everysens stood out not only in terms of the proposed solution, but also in its ability to understand our needs and support us. Everysens is not only an expert in rail, intelligent data collection and processing but also a partner for us on the customer project. After a few weeks of piloting, carried out in the middle of a period of containment, we chose to commit ourselves to Everysens," says Mr Jean-Marc Viallatte.

A veritable "Control Tower", the Everysens solution meets Arkema's ambitions. Fully interoperable and interactive, the platform integrates real-time sensor data from its various rental companies (Ermewa, VTG, Atir-Rail, Millet and Wascosa), thereby making Arkema's transportation safe across all its business units. The Everysens platform is also a source of analysis for this major chemical company, in order to identify performance levers proactively on its internal management as well as on the commitments of its partners. Arkema is studying the possibility of deploying the solution in North America.

Youness Lemrabet, CEO Everysens for his part emphasizes: "What is unique here is the scope of the project, which is global and the will to harmonize rail activities at Group level to bring it up to the same standard as other modes of road and sea transport. This is proof that rail has its rightful place in the sustainable Supply Chain of manufacturers, playing an important role in their commitment to decarbonation".

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