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ONE FOR THE ROAD
Regency in Düsseldorf, Germany, its regular venue for its Annual Meeting, for its 2019 event this past 14 November. Welcoming the delegates, ECTA president Andreas Zink, director of LKW Walter, declared that the unavoidable topics for 2019 were digitisation and decarbonisation. “We won’t be able to solve everything today,” he said but, echoing the theme of the previous month’s annual meeting of the European Petrochemical Association (EPCA), “we can carry on the journey.”
leverage estimated time of arrival (ETA) data. LKW Walter realised that this information, which was requested by its customers, could also be used for internal planning. Beaufils explained that ETA cannot be simply calculated on the basis of the distance from the load point to the delivery point; any ETA calculation has to take into account such factors as the weather and road congestion. Driver behaviour also has an influence but, Beaufils said, that cannot be gauged by talking to drivers: it needs to be based on machine learning using data derived from the vehicles. Another major influence is the profile of each individual loading and unloading point, taking account of the time taken to load or unload at different times of the day and different days of the week. Alert readers will have spotted that this implies the collection of a large volume of data and, Beaufils questioned: what do you do with it when you have it? In essence, he said, data is “fuel for innovation”. It also implies a
MINING FOR DATA LKW Walter embarked on the digitisation journey some time ago, as evidenced by the first speaker, Vincent Beaufils, managing director of Veroo, a company formed by a spin-off from work done by LKW Walter to
move away from static, relational databases to streaming data. In a digitised world, systems need to handle live information, but existing systems are not designed to do that. The other change that operators need to get used to is that the information they need is not all under their control, and ownership is
REPORT • ECTA’S 2019 ANNUAL MEETING REFLECTED THE NEW NORMAL IN THE CHEMICAL LOGISTICS INDUSTRY, WITH PLENTY OF TALK ABOUT DIGITISATION AND SUSTAINABILITY There is a huge appetite for knowledge these days. The world is changing fast and those in the chemical logistics business are being affected by new technologies and new demands on their activities. That much has been made apparent over the past year by the major events in the industry, particularly in Europe, where all operators are coming under increasing pressure to improve their environmental performance. So it was that the European Chemical Transport Association (ECTA) ended up having to turn away potential delegates as it filled the available space at the Hyatt
ECTA’S 2019 ANNUAL MEETING ATTRACTED A SELLOUT CROWD TO TALK ABOUT THE WAY FORWARD
HCB MONTHLY | JANUARY 2020
