This Thursday, November 17th took place the 5th edition of the International Rail Summit, the annual landmark event for innovative rail and intermodal logistics, gathering shippers, forwarders and other freight key players from the Everysens community.
After a visit of the T3M intermodal rail terminal of Bonneuil, 150 industry and transport players gathered for a plenary conference dynamically mixing round tables, feedback sessions and demonstrations. Speakers and the audience discussed current challenges and opportunities opened up by rail transport in the current geopolitical crisis and upcoming economic crisis. (Find the full program here).
The plenary conference was concluded by an award ceremony, much awaited. The goal?Reward large companies for their logistics innovations in the rail industry around 3 prizes, recognizing the different stages of a successful digital project.
From onboarding (Start Award) to first results (Scale Award), all the way to confirmed ROI (Grow Award), three companies distinguished themselves by their digital maturity:
- Danucem - Start Laureate " Best onboarding "
Member company of the CRH Group - a leading global manufacturer of building materials -,Danucem adopted a just-in-time model at its terminals, making proactivity and collaboration strategic. At the beginning of October 2022, Danucem logistics operators started planning their trains collaboratively, following their wagons and transports, and analysing their rail performance on Everysens Transport Visibility Management System (TVMS).
“Making our rail operations more reliable and transparent by digitalization will allow us to increase our efficiency by 5-10% and help us to switch additional volumes of our transports from road to rail. We are very excited about our first month using Everysens and are convinced it will help us reduce our costs and carbon footprint while reinforcing rail excellence.” explains Attila Váczi, Senior Railway Expert at Danucem.
- Borealis L.A.T - Scale Laureate " Best Run "
5 years ago, Borealis L.A.T (Borealis commercial entity that markets, sells and distributes Fertilizers and Technical Nitrogen) started its rail digitalization journey. Since real-time data is unlocked on the entire wagon fleet, it can now be leveraged fully. Instead of accessing geolocation data from the portal of each rail-company using the dedicated GPS device separately, Borealis L.A.T uses Everysens as a ‘single source of truth’ for rail information. With smart alerts on fleet utilization and dashboards based on the available real-time data, BorealisL.A.T gained in efficiency and visibility. This is a win-win both for the company itself as for all its European customers.
“With the support of Everysens, we have implemented dashboards in order to measure the wagon utilization rate and thereby optimize our wagon fleet. We can analyze how long different journey stake, monitor the time spent in workshops, the use rate, etc. With data and dashboards provided by Everysens, we can make informed decisions to optimize our rail logistics with more confidence than before.” adds Marijke Vrins, Global Logistics Manager at Borealis L.A.T.
- HeidelbergCement France (Ciments Calcia) - Grow Laureate " Best ROI "
With 9 manufacturing sites, 5 terminals mainly located around Paris and more than 400wagons used on a daily basis, Ciments Calcia (part of HeidelbergCement France) is a major player in the French cement industry. HeidelbergCement France had identified 2 key challenges in its supply chain strategy: decarbonization and digitalization. With Everysens TVMS, the building materials company now has a single tool to transmit transport orders to its various railway partners, to ensure real-time monitoring of its trains, and to increase the overall productivity of its railway activity.
“Decarbonization is a key challenge we have to handle in the coming years in the building material industry. Integrating real-time visibility deep into our transport processes enabled us to optimize our rail operations and to prevent any spillover to road transportation. One KPI speaks for itself in this project: with Everysens, we managed to increase our wagon fleet productivity by 5%, thus reducing our carbon footprint”, states Philippe Labbé, Director Of Logistics at HeidelbergCement France.
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