The Open Logistics Foundation is a non-profit operating foundation advocating the promotion of open source applications in logistics.
The Foundation’s primary goal is to facilitate collaborative development of open source solutions to existing problems in logistics and supply chain management. Our Innovation Community develops common standards, tools, and services, which can be used commercially by any player in the industry. Collaborative development and the use of open source software and hardware ensures high process efficiency. The Foundation offers various possibilities to participate.
Established/launched: 2021
Building on previous projects: SENSE
How does the Physical Internet relate to the creation of the Foundation ?In many operational aspects of the logistics industry similar assets such as trucks, pallets, warehouse systems, are in use and sometimes even shared. One major issue however has been the differentiation in supply chain processes and their related IT solutions. This results in the major problem that close collaboration between companies is often made impossible just because the used processes and IT-systems and procedures are just not compatible. This is also one of the reasons why there are so few IoT and AI scale-up companies and solutions in logistics even though this would be an ideal playing field: start-ups can have a perfect solution for a process but if they want to implement it at another company, there are slight differences, because everyone’s process is (perceived to be) unique even though the differences are minimal and not fundamental). There are just so many heterogeneous solutions out there. If the ambition is to increase efficiency through collaboration there’s a clear need for streamlined solutions to overcome the barrier of nobody wanting to use IT-solutions outside of their own framework.
To overcome this, there was a need for a collaborative framework in which there is not a single party dominating all the others. Hence the concept of an open collaborative logistics platform. A common umbrella that provides free access and the opportunity to install updates. The Open Logistics Foundation has been set up by Fraunhofer IML as an open source community in which there cannot be one party dominating it. Through the Foundation, a large Logistics Service Provider (LSP) can share a process in the open source but if there are a number of others that want to adjust such process and there is a strong alignment on the modified process then it is the modified process that prevails. This is certainly new for the bigger parties but very interesting for the smaller ones.
What project outcomes inspired creation of the foundation) ?
The Physical Internet philosophy is completely embedded in the Foundation and it is also following major logistics trends. The project outcomes mapped by the SENSE project and the PI roadmap developed by the SENSE project has inspired founders of the foundation. To implement the PI, streamlining or interoperability of processes and software is essential. Such open source developed solutions enabled by the foundation will be the building blocks of the PI.
What are the enablers (or possible barriers) to the successful deployment of the Foundation ?
To respond to this question it is perhaps interesting to highlight how the foundation is structured. The members are gathered to commit to collaboration and creating an open source community. They are believers of that sustainability is something that can only be achieved together. This is also true for social sustainability from a digital perspective. Fully optimised processes can still result in suboptimal substantiation of single solutions, in which case you need to collaborate for which you need streamlined interoperable processes and the software to support it.