Interview with Bernhard Schmaldienst
| Mr Bernhard Schmaldienst is a well-experienced logistics and digitalization expert. He has more than 15 years of leadership experience from various management roles in global 3PL companies. For many years he successfully conducted global business transformation projects in more than 30 countries before switching toward general management functions. At Transporeon Bernhard contributes to our vision of bringing transportation in sync with the world. Focus in his business unit is to deliver market-leading digital solutions in the areas of market intelligence, freight procurement and freight audit for shippers, carriers and logistics service providers. |
1. Austria is an export-focused country. Do you think that the digitalization of processes will have a significant impact on the economy in the post-Covid world? Studies show that about 30% of transportation spending goes on „waste“ like empty runs, waiting times, or inefficient manual processes. This adds up to €60 billion per year, as well as increasing CO2 emissions and negatively impacting sustainability. If recent disruptions like the Covid-19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine have shown us anything – it is that visibility and resilience are key to success in supply chain management. Companies with better digital tools and automated processes significantly outperform their competitors. With all that in mind, it’s clear that ongoing digitalization will continue to accelerate its impact on the logistics industry – and in turn, global economies – in the years to come. That’s why we at Transporeon will continue to work on bringing transportation in sync with the world. 2. Tell us about the key benefits, where digitalization brings the biggest value to Transporeon and its clientele? Our focus is on creating value for our customers at all stages of the transportation process, all enabled by technology. We start with Market Intelligence and Freight Procurement services to ensure you have a best-in-class strategy, reliable partners, and competitive rates. We continue with Transport Execution, Real-Time Visibility, and Yard-management solutions to provide your daily operations with the tools needed to run the most efficient, transparent, and agile supply chains in the world. We complete the cycle with Freight Audit & Settlement services to enable best-in-class financial governance. There are so many opportunities available for businesses that are prepared to embrace the potential of digital transformation. That’s why we offer solutions across the whole supply chain cycle. And the beauty is that shippers or carriers don’t have to go 100% straight away. They can pick certain modules or services based on where they see the biggest potential or where the more critical challenges are. That’s the level of flexibility that digitalization provides, enabling businesses to realize great returns on investment without overreaching. 3. How is digitization changing the logistics and freight forwarding industry – what is the impact? First-generation digitalization is often focused on creating connectivity between parties, building data sets, and recording events in real-time. The main goal is to create transparency and improve efficiency. This is state-of-the-art for many companies already. But we are now quickly moving towards the second generation of digitalization activities. Here, we should be able to create automated transactions based on all the data we have. Parties should be able to fully automate their processes and contracts without human intervention, and predict and execute future actions based on real-time insights. This will have an even bigger impact on our industry over the coming years. Innovation is happening faster than ever and market players that aren’t able to keep up with this pace will see an increasing gap in both agility and profitability. 4. Looking into the future, what do you have in store for the rest of 2022 and the years to come? 2022 is set to be an exciting year for us, with several great new products and innovations. Here are just a few: – Freight Matching – this solution will tackle the industry challenge of sub-contracting and automating the associated processes. If you’re a dispatcher at a freight forwarder or carrier, this is the solution for you. – Carbon Visibility dashboard designed to help shippers and carriers precisely, transparently and efficiently measure and benchmark their green gas emissions from transports. This tool will answer the EC´s CSRD (corporate sustainability reporting directive) which comes into force in 2023. – Transporeon Insights – our recently launched market intelligence platform continues to enable better understanding and decision making for everyone involved in the European FTL market. It already uses data from more than 120.000 transports per day, and based on our customers’ feedback, we will release many new features in the months and years to come. – Our AI-enabled Autonomous Procurement solution is ready to scale after successful proof-of-concepts with some of the best companies in the world. It’s perfect for large-scale spot-procurement organizations. There’s so much more I could mention. For anyone involved in logistics and supply chain management – stay tuned! |
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At Transporeon, our mission is to bring transportation in sync with the world! We power the largest global freight network of 1,300 shippers, 100 large retailers plus 130,000 logistic service providers and carriers. They execute about 100,000 transports per day on our cloud and tender about €20bn freight volume per year – 60% land, 30% ocean, 10% air. Our platform enables transparent supply chains and efficient processes for all participants. They easily connect and collaborate as Transporeon facilitates interoperability. We optimise route and resource planning to avoid empty runs and waiting times. Our tools are available in a modular way. They cover market intelligence and benchmarking, freight procurement and rate management, transport execution, dock scheduling and yard management, tracking and visibility, freight settlement, payment and audit. We are fully GDPR-compliant including our data lake for automated decision-making support based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. For more information visit www.transporeon.com
www.transporeon.com |