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BREAKBULKONE
As the world rides the pandemic roller coaster with countries opening and closing to travel, we at Breakbulk Events & Media continue with the weekly BreakbulkONE newsletter to keep the industry connected and supply welcome good news. Here’s a selection of subscriber favorites from the last few weeks.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM BRENT PHELPS, LONG-TIME PROJECT MANAGER
Who said project cargo was only about modules, turbines, transformers, pipe, valves, structural steel, etc.? What if I told you project cargo also consisted of pizza, ice cream, Christmas trees and more? These are some of the items that routinely shipped on our breakbulk vessels and aircraft charters while working for an U.S.based engineering, procurement and construction contractor.
I was the project logistics manager for an LNG plant being constructed in Algeria during the 1990s. The country was facing a civil war between the government and Islamic extremists. I was stateside but our team at the jobsite could not leave the camp or jobsite. So, what do you do when you need a pizza delivered or to celebrate a holiday? Call the logistics guy in the States! USAID was providing assistance to the project so the material had to be sourced in the States and transport had to be through U.S. carriers. For ocean transport we chose Lykes Lines and utilized the Port of Charleston. Our breakbulk material was consolidated at our export packer in Charleston where it was export packed and sent to the port. Material that was already export packed was sent directly to the Port of Charleston’s Columbus Street Terminal. The call forward on the vessel was determined when we accumulated the necessary freight revenue tons for an inducement into the Algerian Port of Oran. For air transport we utilized Emery Worldwide DC-8s out of Charlotte, North Carolina. The departure date was determined once we accumulated 50 tons of urgent cargo in Charlotte. The breakbulk vessels and aircraft charters departed about once a month over a two-year period. I was present for the load-out of each vessel and aircraft. This gave jobsite the opportunity to provide me with a shopping list for each voyage and flight.
The shopping list began rather innocently with a simple request for a weight lifting magazine when I was loading out our first breakbulk vessel.
TAKE YOUR STORY GLOBAL: Build Your Own BreakbulkONE Show We invite you to work with us to produce a BreakbulkONE Show about YOUR company! Talk to your sales rep or submit a request at breakbulk.com/page/one.
I provided the magazine to the chief mate with instructions to hand it over to our personnel at the offloading port. Soon word spread at the jobsite. For the next vessel I received a list with the employees’ names and what they were requesting. Requests included food items, clothing, toiletries, more magazines and anything else the folks could not get at jobsite with the lockdown. The list would get longer and longer to the point when I would soon be scheduling a full day just for shopping. Thanksgiving was approaching and the jobsite had an idea on how to coordinate the dinner. Simple enough, just put it on our aircraft charter, including the gravy. The Thanksgiving dinner success led to Santa’s list the next month. Christmas trees, lights, decorations, candy and more food, were loaded on pallets and included on the aircraft’s manifest. Then came the pizza request. “Can you get some pizzas and throw them on the plane, we only need 25?” Little did I know this would lead to the monthly fast-food requests for the remaining aircraft charters.
A logistics study/plan was needed for shipping fast food to Algeria. It included sourcing ice, how much, coolers with specific dimensions and timing the food pick-up to coordinate with the aircraft departure! Over the two-year span of the project I think I was the most popular guy at the jobsite even though I didn’t physically work there.
So now you know the most important delivery to jobsite may not be that 100-ton transformer the project manager is screaming for, it might just be an extra-large pepperoni pizza. BBONE
What to Watch on Breakbulk
• Business Outlook with Fluor, Intermarine Americas, LV Shipping, NNR
Global Logistics
• Offshore Wind Projects in the
U.S. with Blue Water Shipping, GE
Renewables, Ørsted Energy, Trade
Point Atlantic, Wood Mackenzie
• Could Remote Expert Technology
Be the Next Big Thing? with Allianz
Risk Consulting, ATS Trucking,
Bechtel Corp., DHL
• Space Cargo Logistics with ATK, a subsidiary of Northrup Grumman, NASA, Spaceflight, Volga-Dnepr
BreakbulkONE Show: Page Mcrae Engineering Offers Solutions to Common Port HS&E Problems
Can Shippers Help Relieve Seafarer Crisis?
Drewry Looks at 2021 Three Ways
Breakbulk Europe: The Digital Special
• Business Outlook: How the Cargo
Sector Is Adapting to the New
Normal with 4D Supply Chain Consulting, AAL Shipping, Abengoa,
Rebel Group, Volga-Dnepr UK
• Growing a Sustainable Future with bremenports, DP World, Smart
Freight Centre, Wallenius Wilhelmsen, World Ocean Council
• Carrier Check-in: Cargoes, Hotspots and the Road Ahead with AAL Shipping, BBC Chartering, MSC, SAL
Heavy Lift, United Heavy Lift
• The Breakbulk Technology Landscape: Building a Competitive
Advantage with BlockLab, G2
Ocean, Hansa Meyer Global Transport Co., Ltd. Thailand, ProLog
Innovation
DREWRY LOOKS AT 2021 THREE WAYS
In a special edition of the BreakbulkONE Show, senior analyst Susan Oatway from Drewry covered the top-level findings from the company’s recent report and give her insight on what this all means for the project cargo industry in 2021.
First, Oatway looked at the current state of the global project cargo fleet, which she broke down into four categories: premium project carrier, project carrier, multipurpose, multipurpose (no gear). “The fleet at the moment is pretty static at around just under 3,200 vessels, representing 29.2 million deadweight tonnes,” Oatway said. What concerns her is the Susan Oatway fact that newbuilding orders Drewry have declined significantly over the last five years. Today there are only 63 vessels on order, less than 2 percent of the operating fleet. “There’s no real growth in the overall fleet,” she said.
But that may not be all bad under today’s market conditions with the lower cargo volumes recorded over the past nine months. Further, demolitions have already reached the level seen in all of 2019.
“There might be a slight contraction in the fleet this year, which is definitely a good thing when demand is weak,” she said. “Then it’s much better to have fewer vessels competing for those cargoes.”
However, the decline in newbuildings points to a larger concern—an overall lack of optimism or confidence in this sector. “There’s been so little investment in this sector for the last three or four years, but at some point things will get better.”
Oatway’s report looks at MPV demand under three scenarios: base case, worst case and best case, which project different trajectories for the virus’ subsequent economic rebound. When she first wrote her report in June, things were different. “The last time I wrote the report in June I couldn’t see any upside,” she said. “I had a worst case and I had an even more worst case, so the fact that I now have a best case, even though it’s only very slightly better, is promising.”
Under all three scenarios, she projects growth for the sector in 2021. “Our base case is something like 3 percent growth next year, best case is for 5 percent growth and our worst is only 1 percent growth, but it’s still growth.”
So where will demand come from? Oatway points to the demand seen over the last three months from the manufacturing sector for quarantinerelated consumer goods. “While shipping demand fell off a cliff in March and April, it started to come back by June when consumers were at home thinking, “We need a new desk, a new flat screen. We saw growth in containerized demand that was much better than we thought it was going to be,” Oatway said. In turn, this took some of the pressure off container ship owners who might otherwise have looked for breakbulk cargoes.
Looking ahead, Oatway expects countries to kick-start their economies again by looking at domestic construction, which will positively impact volumes. Renewables is a big bright spot for the project cargo fleet as well. People have seen the dramatic effects of reduced manufacturing, less driving and other positive impacts on the environment, which Oatway called a “game changer.”
“People now want cheap, friendly fuel and they have realized, when you close down everything you get a much cleaner environment,” Oatway said. She added that although many projects were put on hold this year, she expects them to come back in 2021. BBONE
HOW TO BUILD A RESILIENT BUSINESS STRATEGY WITH FLUOR’S RAJ DESAI
Breakbulk caught up with Raj Desai in his Houston office where he was in the midst of two days of strategy planning meetings. He set his computer to “away” and dedicated the next 20 minutes to sharing his insights on business resilience and the strategic planning process to the Breakbulk community. Here he set the stage for Breakbulk Americas’ Digital Special session “Business Outlook for Key Sectors.”
Q: How has the pandemic affected the project pipeline and projects ready to start construction?
Raj Desai:
I can tell you from the industry viewpoint Raj Desai that projects are definitely Fluor affected. Investment patterns have changed. Clients have basically gone back and suspended some of the projects and some of them have been cancelled. And, for the projects that are in existence, we have issues there as well because of a disrupted supply chain.
We had suppliers who could not go back and start their manufacturing operations in certain countries. This is something we saw broadly during March, April and May, but slowly and steadily we see things improving and the supply chain getting stabilized. We’re getting our materials coming back on track and we expect a positive turn in the market pretty soon.
Q: Do you anticipate any longterm impact or shifts in where manufacturing will occur?
RD: We’re talking about a lot of changes in supply chain strategies internally and we are talking with our big suppliers who have manufacturing capabilities overseas. This may take a new shape pretty soon.
We are also seeing consolidation of the supply market with some of the small manufacturers that will likely be consolidated with the bigger ones, and then some of them will go away altogether because of the current economic situation.
We do see that effect for sure, but at the same time I can tell you that we have seen manufacturers getting stronger over the last couple of months. They are restarting their manufacturing capabilities. While we’ll see a change, the changes may not be as drastic as people fear.
Q: What markets or sectors over the last few months have been the most resilient, and what do you attribute that to?
RD: In a broad sense, companies like Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple can’t be put into any particular sector because of their market depth and breadth across the world. If you look at the sectors that have done well, I would basically look at the pharma sector, the healthcare sector and the food sector.
The small retail discounters have also done quite well. As you move on into the other sectors where we have seen problems, these are basically manufacturers. But it all depends on how this whole thing is going to move forward, and I’m pretty optimistic.
Finally, the world has to go on. We will have all the basic things that we need. The human population will continue to exist, and it’s all about the timing on when we get the vaccines in place. And if we get those vaccines in place, I can tell you all these sectors are ready to rebound. That even includes the manufacturing sector, the industrial sector, as well as the oil and gas industry. There is no reason for them not to rebound because I don’t see a permanent deformation in any of these sectors so far.
Q: What does the strategic planning process look like when you’re viewing a somewhat uncertain landscape?
RD: The buzzword in the industry these days is resilience, and business resilience is what we’re talking about here. You can build in a set of contingencies. You can basically have modularity in terms of small sectors that can be affected, but would not collapse the entire system. Business diversity definitely helps a company be more resilient.
Those are some of the things that you can build in, but I see resilience as a continuous process. You go through and navigate through the different business environments that come over a period of time. If you are sitting at the wheel of your industrial sector, you are basically going to sense and then you are going to drive. You will steer and adjust your business. You sense what is changing and shift – you are responding and adapting. Then you will be able to transform your organization to get to the new path and make sure that the organization keeps on the path of progress. And then you flourish. BBONE
Watch the “Business Outlook for Key Sectors” webinar at breakbulk. com/page/breakbulk365.
HOW TO ACHIEVE REAL SUSTAINABILITY WITH ROGER STREVENS
Following a Breakbulk365 webinar on “Growing a Sustainable Future,” Roger Strevens, vice president of global sustainability for Wallenius Wilhelmsen, took the opportunity to answer additional viewer questions posed during the webinar. This is a selection of the best.
Q: What is the best way to keep sustainability a “hot topic” and keep the current momentum going?
Roger
Strevens: The answer centers around realizing Roger Strevens the increasing significance of Wallenius Wilhelmsen sustainability to so many business stakeholders. The interests in sustainability of those stakeholders, whether they’re customers, lenders, investors, employees or authorities, can vary widely, however the trend is absolutely clear: they know more, they expect more and, therefore, the necessity to engage effectively is getting clearer all the time.
Considering the implications of sustainability are affecting many, if not all, corporate functions, companies are strongly advised to entrain it in their core business strategies, processes and culture. Moving sustainability from being a corporate sideshow to being a business-critical theme will, by definition, keep it in focus.
It’s also important that company leaders realise that their ability to set the agenda or the pace of change on sustainability is very limited; its growth to prominence will happen with or without them; so the choice executive leadership have is to get ahead of it or get left behind.
Lastly, there is a danger that many executives will fall victim to the frogin-the-kettle sustainability maxim. Sustainability is transforming industry in what tends to be a gradual, but inexorable way. For most executives, and for most of the time, there’ll be some other more immediately pressing issue to tend to. The risk then is that one day those executives will be confronted with the harsh realization that their business has been badly weakened by failing to engage, or worse, that they’re becoming obsolete because of it.
The best way to keep sustainability as a “hot topic” is a constant discussion with all parties in the industry – constant updates from top management all the way down. In that process, improvements and future development can be found.
Q: Do you have any future plans (globally maybe) concerning that?
RS: They say that culture eats strategy for breakfast. In the same way, companies that manage sustainability successfully have more than a good business-integrated sustainability strategy; they have made it a part of their culture, their purpose and their identity. By doing that they have moved beyond treating sustainability as an abstract plan or set of activities, they have bridged the gap to people and the way they feel, behave and work; they’ve made it relatable.
Of course, the foregoing is much more easily said than done, but it’s probably the most fundamental thing to get right because otherwise sustainability may always remain as somebody else’s job. That approach doesn’t work for safety or quality, and it won’t work for sustainability either. All hands on deck is what’s needed
Q: Will sustainability take a backseat in the current Covid-19 environment?
RS: Except for the initial weeks of the Covid-19 emergency when there was massive disruption to everything, our experience would suggest that, if anything, sustainability has become more prominent than before. One reason for that is the relationship between corporate resilience, which has emerged as a major topic du jour, and sustainability. Good sustainability management is future-oriented and sensitive to changes in the (business) environment, both of which are key attributes to good corporate resilience.
Aside from the foregoing, the premise of the question is interesting: why would sustainability take a backseat because of Covid-19? If the answer is that sustainability initiatives represent just a cost and burden then best course of action is to get better at sustainability, rather than to ditch it. Sustainability is transforming business and is, therefore, something that has to be contended with anyway; companies cannot opt out. Moreover, any sustainability initiatives that are worth their salt should contribute as much to conventional business value creation as they do to driving positive change.
Q: Is the breakbulk and project cargo industry taking enough responsibility for the climate?
RS: Breakbulk and project cargo are no more or less immune to the climate agenda than any other segment of the industry. How well that fact is recognized by the participants (whether they’re shippers, forwarders or carriers ) in the segment varies widely … just as it does in other segments too.
Overall though, the trend is unmistakeable: steadily more shippers and forwarders are adopting supply chain sustainability management. The drivers for this include the need to mitigate (reputational and legal) risk, the need to improve supply chain resilience and the need to find strong logistics partners for what is clearly going to be a very disruptive period as the transition to low and zero emissions freight services really gets underway. It’s interesting to note that all of these factors are business motivated. Good business management and sustainable business management are two sides of the same coin; one cannot exist without the other. BBONE
OFFSHORE WIND MANUFACTURING WILL SHIFT TO U.S.
Danish firm Ørsted Energy is a pioneer in wind energy, but the company didn’t start out that way. John O’Keefe, head of marine affairs North America at Ørsted Energy, talks to Breakbulk about the company’s journey.
Q: Ørsted Energy was recently named the most sustainable corporation in the world by Corporate Knights. How did the company move from being focused solely John O’Keefe on oil & gas to renewables?
Ørsted Energy John O’Keefe: Ørsted Energy decided early on that this transition was going to be necessary, and they decided to do it with the mindset that if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right. They envisioned a world that runs entirely on green energy. We’ve made huge strides to get where we are today and we’re excited for the future.
Energy transitions historically are not an easy transition. While some view it as competition for other energy sources and job loss, we see this is an immense opportunity. We’re taking all of the knowledge out there and using whatever existing oil and gas resources that can be retrofitted for use in offshore wind.
We have a great workforce and these fleets all around the world. We want to make sure they’re all involved in this transition as we go from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Q: Tell us more about reusing available assets, moving them from oil and gas projects to offshore wind.
JO: When we look back to Block Island wind farm, it has now been over four years since we built the nation’s first offshore wind farm in Rhode Island. In the construction process, we did look to our existing oil and gas assets and resources. Some of the labor was used to build the foundations because the knowledge and the labor needed for Block Island were very similar to oil and gas operations.
Vessels were another element that we could transition. Today, we’re still in a position where we don’t have necessarily all the right vessels that are needed in the supply chain, so we make use of what we have. Some vessels are retrofitted and some are using their capabilities. For instance, jack-up vessels were an integral part of the Block Island construction process and I see the jack-up vessels that are now used in the Gulf being used for offshore wind in the years to come.
Q: What projects are in the Ørsted Energy pipeline?
JO: It’s a pretty exciting pipeline if we look at the East Coast of the U.S. It depends on who you ask on what day: it could be it could be 25 gigawatts or 30 gigawatts here in the next 20 to 30 years. That’s a massive amount, especially when you compare it to what currently exists in the water, which is a mere 30 megawatts.
And it means a huge amount of investment and opportunity for mariners and the land-based supply chain.
In the near term, we have almost 3 gigawatts in our pipeline right now. We are in various stages of development on all the projects and right now we’re working our way through the federal permitting process.
Q: You spoke about opportunity for supply chain players. Can you please quantify that?
JO: These projects are complex, and as you can imagine, large-scale commercial wind farms involve quite a bit of the supply chain and have many moving pieces.
When you look at the major components that are involved in an offshore turbine you have the submarine cables that connect the towers, the turbines themselves to substations, and then back to the power grid on land.
Then you have the foundations which could be monopiles similar to Block Island or gravity-based, etc. Regardless of type, foundation pieces are large and have to be manufactured and moved, and then you have the tower pieces themselves, along with the nacelles that are getting bigger and bigger. And then there are the blades, which are probably the biggest pieces in terms of size – not weight – and are now reaching pretty fantastic sizes. Finally there are all of the smaller pieces.
Q: Do you think we’ll see offshore wind constructed in other waters? Maybe the U.S. West Coast or the Gulf, or even the Great Lakes?
JO: Yes, I do. Right now the main focus is on the U.S. East Coast because of the “trifecta for development” with the right water depths (shallow water depths on the outer continental shelf), huge demand in the energy corridor from D.C. up to Boston, and the wind speed that is present off the East Coast. It’s the Saudi Arabia of offshore wind.
Development will look to the U.S. West Coast and possibly the Gulf, but the water is deeper. There are solutions that are commercially viable in the floating sector and fixed platforms are coming along. You do have that incredible energy demand on the West Coast and you have excellent wind speeds – you just have that added challenge with the water depth. But that challenge can be absolutely be met.
The U.S. Gulf is overlooked right now, probably because it’s known for oil and gas activity, but there is tremendous opportunity there as well.
BBONE
John O’Keefe participated in the Breakbulk365 “Offshore Wind Projects in the US,” part of Breakbulk Americas: The Digital Special. Go to breakbulk.com/page/breakbulk365 to watch it.
INLAND TRANSPORTATION
BY FELICITY LANDON TAKING THE DIGITAL HIGHWAY
Meeting Project Cargo Route and Tracking Needs
If you order a pizza on your smartphone, visibility is instant: you’ll be notified when the pizza is being made, put in the oven, ready to box up and on the way to your door.
“Why not give the same visibility to shippers and manufacturers?” asks Tony Stroncheck, co-founder and president of ProMiles Software Development Corp. in the U.S. “If I had a valuable piece of cargo being shipped, I would want to keep an eye on what is happening.”
A smart solution to provide that visibility, allowing shippers to manage and track all matters related to their road transporters, is one of a series of initiatives developed by ProMiles in partnership with the Pit Row Group, which is also a reseller of the products.
Both companies are members of the Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association, or SC&RA. As Steven Todd, SC&RA vice president, transportation, said, digital and new technology solutions designed to streamline and improve road transport are about to explode in North America, and the ProMiles/Pit Row partnership is a big part of that.
The new tracking/managing process will enable the shipper/manufacturer to log in and follow progress from the start of the permitting process through loading on the truck and all the way along the road journey, Stroncheck said. “It allows them to be more interactive, to view things and watch where their shipment is.”
In some ways, this is nothing new. Companies hauling goods for the Department of Defense or the automotive sector in the U.S. have been required to have tracking devices on their trucks for two decades, so the shipper has the ability to know where the load is every hour. “But the oversize/overweight sector doesn’t have that,” Stroncheck said.
REAL-TIME TRUCK INFORMATION
ProMiles has been working with multiple original equipment manufacturer shippers to develop this solution, and is now building and refining the APIs ready for launch soon.
The system will enable shippers to update their information on where a truck is every 15 minutes. And just as you would like to know if the pizza oven breaks down and there is going to be a delay to you receiving your supper, so the system is being developed to send fault code notifications to the shipper if there is a problem with the truck engine, so that they can be involved in any decisions, or just kept informed of them. “If you can give the shipper that visibility, you can eliminate tons of phone calls,” Stroncheck said.
The first project ProMiles and Pit Row Group tackled together was Permit Manager, which offers digital mapping and multi-state one-stop-shop permitting. “We are finishing up development on this – it is one of a kind,” said Michael Morgan, CEO of the Pit Row Group. “It covers both routes and regulation across multiple states, with all of their different processes and permitting rules.”
Stroncheck explained: “We knew in the early 1990s how difficult it is to establish what routes you can take with a regular size truck, let alone oversize/ overweight.” ProMiles first started working with the state of Texas, developing a permitting system to replace the old ways, he said. “You had to call agents at the DoT, tell them the dimensions, where you would pick up and where you were going to, and ask what route you could take. The agent would take up a big paper map and work out which routes you could travel. It could sometimes take days or weeks to decide the most accurate route.”
ProMiles requested all the data on bridges and routes, and access to bridge analysis software. “Why should
“Why should we have people looking at paper maps and making mistakes? The first thing is to analyze every bridge on the route to see if a bridge can cope with the load involved. In the past they might have routed trucks hundreds of miles out of the way when it could be done with just a half-mile detour. It is the same with avoiding obstacles.” – Tony Stroncheck, ProMiles Software
we have people looking at paper maps and making mistakes? The first thing is to analyze every bridge on the route to see if a bridge can cope with the load involved. If not, sometimes a reroute can be done by cutting off the highway to bypass the bridge, perhaps using a ramp. In the past they might have routed trucks hundreds of miles out of the way when it could be done with just a half-mile detour. It is the same with avoiding obstacles.”
ProMiles developed permitting system software that can be configured to meet the specific needs of different jurisdictions. It worked with Pit Row Group to develop Permit Manager, the software through which transport operators can submit a permit application just once for all the jurisdictions using ProMiles software.
A key is having real-time information: if a bridge has collapsed or a piece of road is under construction, ProMiles’ system knows of any changes instantly and maps are automatically updated; it will reroute and reissue the permit even when the truck is already in transit.
Texas was issuing about 540,000 permits a year when the project began: “We are now doing 900,000 permits a year for Texas,” Stroncheck said. “More people are able to order permits in a timely manner, where before the process might have taken so long as to be too late for their timetable. In the past, people used to haul illegally because the system was so cumbersome.”
The Permit Manager system is now live in 13 jurisdictions, with two more due to be up and running by the end of the year.
SIMPLIFYING PERMITTING
Connecting the dots means that where, for example, a truck will be crossing five states, there is no need for a transport manager to go through five individual state permitting processes, only to find that the permitted routes don’t actually coordinate with each other, there are mismatches between time restrictions or connections at borders, and they have to go back and start again. “You can have a different permit for each county or even city in a state,” Stroncheck said. “Putting it all together has been one of the biggest pains in oversize/overweight loads. Since we are managing all the routing, you can put in the origin and destination, and we will come back to you with one application which knows the routes that will be approved for each jurisdiction. It avoids duplication of information or the need to rekey your company name 100 times.”
ProMiles and Pit Row Group have also developed a Pilot Manager system which is due to start testing in two jurisdictions soon. “Pilot car licensing and insurance requirements all vary state by state,” Morgan said. “Now we are able to bring the components together. Pilot Manager takes all the route and state requirements and checks which pilot cars have what is needed, and provides carriers with a list of people to choose from.”
Among other projects, ProMiles has developed audible oversize/overweight route permitting which provides satellite navigation combined with audible guidance which can warn the driver of requirements up ahead – perhaps a bridge with capacity for a maximum of three vehicles at once, or the need to deflate tires by 15 percent in a couple of miles’ distance – and will also sound the alarm if the driver strays off-route. This will be released for the first time in Illinois.
Meanwhile, an E-Credentials system launched in 2019 has really come into its own. A driver can now carry all permissions, information about his journey and his own credentials electronically; whereas in the past an enforcement officer would have to leaf through many pages in a large permit book, now the driver can hold up his phone with a QR code.
“The officer can take a scan of the QR code and download everything – there is no paper to hand over, no need to wind down the window. E-Credentials has become a necessity during Covid-19,” Stroncheck said.
EUROPE-WIDE STANDARDIZATION
ESTA, the European association of abnormal road transport and mobile cranes, has been pushing for Europe-wide standardized permitting documents for years. Speaking to ESTA Director Ton Klijn, his frustration is only too clear. “If you are applying for a permit, the document is different in every European country and in their own language. So for a truck going through four countries, you have to fill in four Ton Klijn different forms in four different lanESTA guages.” He was pessimistic about the changes of standardized electronic permitting across the EU. “We want a standardized document translated into all the European languages. They can’t even achieve that!”
He describes digitalization in the sector in Europe as “in the Stone Age. Very little is digitalized and a lot of countries still rely on faxing and writing letters. To see some more
There is an urgent need for standardization of permitting for oversize loads. CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
governments implementing electronic permitting systems would be a major step forward.”
The Netherlands and Sweden have digital permitting systems that work perfectly, he says: “But some countries are trying to reinvent the wheel, which annoys me. They might benefit from the experience of the Dutch or the Swedes, but they are too proud to pick up the phone and ask for help, so they make the same mistakes that everyone made in the beginning. There are some countries that have nothing digital – and some that don’t want to have anything.”
The French government introduced electronic permitting, but a good number of regions have rejected the idea, so it is not uniformly available.
“We know from America’s almost nationwide system that electronic permitting is a win-win,” Klijn said. “We know if you make it easier to get a permit, more permits will be asked for, and income goes up because more permits are issued and fewer people are needed to run the system. Also, there is less illegal driving, fewer bridge hits and fewer accidents. If it is
a huge problem or too difficult to get a permit, some drivers just go ahead with the trip anyway.”
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
A recent report by Lux Research entitled The Digital Transformation of Transportation and Logistics is mainly focused on unitized/liner shipping and e-commerce operations. However, report author Harshit Sharma said: “We have certainly looked in the project/heavy cargo direction and overall the solutions will look fundamentally the same. Our report looked at three primary challenges: visibility, which is about being able to track goods in real time and track accountability in the supply chain; agility, which is about meeting delivery demands; and sustainability, which is about reducing emissions in your supply chain through electronic tracking and other means, and running logistics in a much more efficient manner.”
Sharma said that as the older generation retires, the younger generation will find it hard to work in a way that doesn’t involve smartphones and digital technology. “The future labor force will find it difficult to be productive without digital tools.”
Start-ups will likely be driving many of the new tech innovations, such as route optimization tools, Sharma said, and he predicts a shift to more “asset-less” operations, where technical companies don’t own any vehicles or assets but buy into those services. Some big carriers could make that move, becoming service providers with no assets, he said.
Do those not taking on digital opportunities risk being left behind? “Definitely there is a risk of getting swallowed up or eventually going bankrupt,” he says. “Those who go digital can offer much better pricing – it gives you the advantage. These things tend to move slowly but I think we could see a bigger push because of Covid-19. This could be a game changer in digital transformation.” BB
Felicity Landon is an award-winning freelance journalist specializing in the ports, shipping, transport and logistics sectors.
