Contemporary strategies to improve and innovate your Supply Chain

SELIS has identified several market segments with high optimization potential, ranging from maritime logistics to the urban last mile deliveries. The optimisation within these segments is subject to the collaboration of the logistics communities that comprise them (horizontal axis of Figure 1).

These logistics communities (LCs) overlap one another since any Supply Chain Actor may be part of several LCs. In order to accommodate the sub- optimal logistics strategies within these communities, SELIS develops a set of pan European Green Logistics Strategies (EGLS). These appear as vertical axes on Figure 1 and can be applied in several market segments, thus facilitating cross- community integration. Each logistics community benefits from a specific mix of customized EGLSs in order to create unique competitive businesses models, with inbuilt incentives for their adoption. The SELIS Business Innovation Matrix reflects an application-related approach that improves a cooperative logistics process on the cloud.

SELIS targeted logistics communities:

Indicatively, SELIS targets the follows Logistics Communities (LCs) addressing effectively their specific challenges.

• LC1 – Transport and Logistics Authorities: Major drivers to customs strategies are the efficient control of goods movement in cross border supply-chains and the cooperation between customs authorities with governmental agencies such as Coordinated Border Management (CBM) and the business community. Required formalities for the movement of goods across borders lead to important transaction costs (up to 10 % of the value of the cargo).
• LC2 – Shippers and Retailer centered communities: Shippers and large retailers traditionally contracted operations out to 3PLs. This practice is steadily overthrown and they take back control of supply chains by combining external and internal providers, leading to horizontal collaborations to form transportation and warehousing synergies. SELIS’ collaborative strategies based on secure and private collaborative services will help extract more value.
• LC3 – Freight Forwarders centered communities: Freight Forwarders, FFs, search for opportunities to increase their efficiency and create competitive advantages. SELIS facilitates the provision of value-added services through better integration between the FFs and their clients, allowing better visibility and responsiveness.
• LC4-Port centered communities: European ports successfully interconnect different transport modes and have pioneered the formation of logistical communities through Community Systems (PCS). SELIS works with Port Communities to increase the competitiveness by enabling the increase of the modal share of the short-sea shipping, by accelerating the introduction of new operational logistical procedures and by facilitating services coordination throughout the supply chain.
• LC5 – Shipping communities: maritime transport is the ground level of intermodal transport chains. SELIS offers information exchange models to support effective interactions between carriers and shippers, and streamline operational reporting and handling of formalities.
• LC6 – Rail, truck and terminal network communities: The real business driver in this segment is to make the rail shift more efficient and valuable to the customers. SELIS focuses specifically on collaboration based on a shared information model that integrates short hauliers-logistics platforms- regional rail network-national rail network.

European Green Logistics Strategies (EGLS)

SELIS enables a number of different Supply Chain strategies. Indicatively:

• Collaborative planning and synchromodality: Depending on the specific context, there are different opportunities for collaboration for sharing transportation capacity, warehousing capacity, aggregation of orders in the last mile and innovative bundling at regional level. SELIS identifies innovative business models, for example synchromodality and co-modality, i.e. allowing flexible use of several transport modes that are specified in advance, which requires re-planning for alternative routes.
• Collaboration Risk and Value Sharing: Collaboration between supply chain partners is a remedy for sub-optimal logistics operations and may yield significant benefits such as inventory or cost reduction and improved asset utilisation. On the other hand, trust, confidentiality and privacy issues are tricky in implementing these strategies.
• Supply Chain Visibility: Visibility provides to supply chain players timely information for better decision support. SELIS Solutions address end-to-end supply chain visibility (E2ESCV) delivering controlled access and transparency to accurate, timely and complete events and data-transactions, content and relevant supply chain information, within and across organizations and services operating supply chains.
• Supply Chain Financing: Firms may decrease their financial costs if they effectively and reliably track operations in the physical supply chain. By gaining visibility on events in a physical supply chain (e.g. placement of purchase order, order shipment, invoice approval), a financial intermediary may better calculate the relevant credit risk and customize its credit offerings.
• Environmental Performance Management: The available carbon footprints are often neither accurate nor reliable since many of the available tools are based on indicative values (e.g average fuel consumption, etc.). SELIS calculates emissions on the fly per shipment based on real-time shipping data and monitors compliance with the latest carbon accounting standards such as the EN 16258:2012.

The SELIS Research and Innovation Unique Value Propositions

SELIS is focused on designing innovative Supply Chains for European entities that have a global focus. The SELIS Tools create the following Unique Value Propositions:

• Enhanced Supply Chain Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing with inbuilt Trust and Governance
• Reduction of complexity in collaborative supply chains and protection or leverage within existing business models
• Extensive coverage across the supply chain and inclusion of all relevant actors
• Provision of total control to businesses over their data and enhancement of data trustworthiness
• Harnessing of the power of Knowledge Graphs and Big Data
• Offering ‘Out of the box’ Cloud data and webservices decentralised infrastructure to form and manage virtual communities for logistic chains
• Cloud Application and Infrastructure Elasticity along with a scalable distributed datastore
• Optimal hybrid mobile communications for any environment
• Privacy preserving content based routing
• Provision of interoperability on demand