Within existing supply chains there is still a significant potential for
the combination of part and single unit loads, but in many cases
competing suppliers as well as fix contracted service providers hinder
optimized truck fill rates and transport consolidation. To overcome
these drawbacks, within the FFG-funded project “protoPI”, a team of
Austrian research and business partners developed a) an integrated
conceptual framework and b) a web-based transportation management
platform in order to show and evaluate the potential of the PI approach
to real life applications. By digitalizing the transport management
process as far as possible, pooling systems for further developed
returnable transportation items (RTIs) are made possible and significant
potential cost savings in the delivery process can be identified,
resulting from the use of specialized transport service providers (TSP).
This could be of particular relevance for small and medium-sized
enterprises, which in many cases are dependent on global forwarding
companies.