Knowledge-enabled Access of Central Europe SMEs to Efficient Transnational Transport Solutions
The KASSETTS regions strongly base their future development on small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) systems and on their transnational trade relations. Transport, logistics and related ICT services play a fundamental role for SMEs as they represent the strategic leverages to be on the Central Europe markets and to be integrated in procurement and distribution chains. Nevertheless, SMEs EU logistics management is far from being optimal and SMEs can hardly access optimised transnational transport solutions because of small shipping and low frequency of their transports and their low level of ICT endowment limiting their accessibility to the logistic supply. These obstacles finally result in a scattered transport demand and a large number of non-saturated running vehicles together with a low use of intermodal transport, producing increasing transport emissions at the same time.
The project was developed to overcome these problems and to answer the need of ICT tools to help manufacturing companies, in particular SMEs, optimising their transnational logistic traffics. Recent results of broker demonstrations which were done on regional level showed that cost savings of more than 20 percent for involved SMEs, a decrease of 30 percent of kilometers per vehicle and a reduction in the number of transport routes by 37 percent are possible. In order to even improve these numbers and to transmit the idea on a transnational level, the project aims to create a stable EU operative ICT network of logistics brokers, based on open source policy, in which every broker is a joint logistic office among SMEs.