Data-driven forwarding: a typology of digital platforms for road freight transport management

Abstract

The omnipresence of digital platforms (DPs) across industries yields platform-based business concepts that disrupt the road freight market, enabling the digitalization of road freight transport management (RFTM). However, the data-driven service capabilities of DPs in supporting RFTM are manifold, and platform research provides opportunities to explore the emerging digital business concepts following the core process of transport management systems (TMSs). This, in particular, results from the side of road freight operators engaged in the transport management process that are increasingly forced to provide customer-centric RFTM via DPs to remain profitable and competitive within a fragmented business environment. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to explore DPs in the road freight transport domain to gain insights into digital freight services and support logistics companies involved in the transportation process with a novel navigation for the identification of required platform-based services. Following the grounded theory methodology, we present a morphological box encompassing 14 dimensions and eight DP types aligned to RFTM. We reveal digital services of DP visibility, optimization, and analytics. With the insights obtained by our research, we contribute to developing a comprehensive understanding of DPs for the enhanced decision-making of transport stakeholders in the area of digital transport management. Our findings provide an established theoretical research ground that guides platforms as markets for practitioners and proposes further research avenues for scholars toward data-driven and digitalized transport logistics.

Designing a shared freight service intelligence platform for transport stakeholders using mobile telematics

“…Likewise, the application of telematics for FTAs reveals IoT service capabilities based on transport monitoring, tracking, and automated notifications in case of deviations in conditions (e.g., temperature), particularly for the food industry (Verdouw et al 2016;Li et al 2017;Salah et al 2020). The real-time information and automatization of telematics-enabled FTAs allow transport stakeholders to achieve visibility and optimizations over freight operations based on the gained data yielding data-driven business models in logistics (Möller et al, 2020;Heinbach et al 2022a). That is, for instance, an automated billing service offered to customers once the FTA equipped with telematics has arrived in a geofenced area.…”

“…Given the increasing digital competition in the transport market due to emerging IoT technologies and digital platforms yielding digital business models by startups (Möller et al 2020;Heinbach et al 2022a), visibility in transport chains has emerged as a commodity service for shippers and consignees. Against this issue, our analysis revealed that transport operators have a strong interest in the detection of irregularities in the equipment used to observe the performance of their fleet with a focus on operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.…”

“…Likewise, enhanced multimodal freight operations have been demonstrated by integrating real-time IoT data in decentralized ecosystems based on peer-to-peer to securely share data using blockchain technologies among the participants (Gallay et al 2017). Moreover, transport orders from digital platforms have shown capabilities by integrated and connected transport operations that emerge especially in the road forwarding sector (e.g., Sucky and Asdecker 2019;Heinbach et al 2022a). For this reason, we suggest a high-level architecture and present related information flows that build on the Industrial Data Spaces (IDS) architecture promoting the concept of decentralized intelligence in logistics and requiring adopters for operation (Sternberg and Andersson 2014).…”

“…platform-centered freight transport chain: (1) identification, sensing, and actuation, (2) data exchange, (3) information integration and (4) application services. This concept provides a valuable approach to investigating our research topic since telematics-enabled FTAs constitute IoT devices with capabilities to convert transport assets into smart connected FTAs that follow the paradigm of a smart service platform (Porter and Heppelmann 2014;Beverungen et al 2020) to enable smart services along with the end-to-end freight lifecycle processes (Issaoui et al 2020;Heinbach et al 2022a). Therefore, we combine the theoretical concepts of virtual food supply chains (Verdouw et al 2016) and intelligent good services (Jevinger and Olsson 2021) and establish an adopted architecture for a novel FSIP as the research ground for the study presented in this paper.…”

Smart Managed Freight Fleet: Ein automatisiertes und vernetztes Flottenmanagement in einem föderierten Datenökosystem

“…Die Nutzung des IT-gestützten Angebots von Diensten orientiert sich dabei an den Geschäftsprozessen der Transportdienstleister mit eigenem Fuhrpark und umfasst bspw. die Auftragsabwicklung, die Sendungsverfolgung, die Routen-und Tourenplanung sowie ein effizientes Fahrzeugmanagement (Heinbach et al 2022a).…”