The KOMODA project consortium invited me to join the project’s Advisory Board. I accepted the invitation with great satisfaction, as it provides an opportunity to observe this ambitious undertaking from a privileged position. The KOMODA project aims to achieve an ambitious goal: a detailed analysis of freight transport in Europe, followed by the promotion of the co-modality concept through an open, fully accessible, and interoperable e-Logistics platform.
The application of ICT solutions in the logistics sector in recent years has brought undeniable benefits; however, certain limitations regarding these solutions are gradually emerging:
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most ICT solutions were created to meet the needs of private companies and improve their internal organization. These solutions are often tailored to the individual needs of a single enterprise and usually lack functionality to support collaboration between companies
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most ICT solutions are related to the supply side of the logistics sector. In other words, it is quite easy to find a tool for fleet management or planning and monitoring transport, while capabilities regarding the structure and organization of the demand side of logistics are difficult to access
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most ICT solutions, due to their complexity and costs, are essentially available only to medium and large enterprises. Consequently, the vast majority of small and micro-enterprises remain outside the mainstream of innovation
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most ICT solutions do not take into account the difficulties associated with the diversity of laws and restrictions existing in different countries and across different modes of transport. Furthermore, existing ICT solutions do not consider barriers resulting from cultural and linguistic differences.
As a result, we have a highly fragmented market with a multitude of tools, versions, and customizations that struggle to communicate with each other. Efforts dedicated to introducing unified (or unifying) models and standards have not yielded significant results due to the massive costs of adapting them to many already existing solutions. A more promising approach seems to be one that promotes flexible and dynamic logistics models while simultaneously securing investments in ICT.
The KOMODA project intends to apply this approach, aiming on one hand to increase the importance of co-modality, and on the other to improve the potential for collaboration between already existing solutions. This is particularly important in the time of a global economic crisis, which requires taking decisive steps related to efficiency, flexibility, and adaptability. The expected final result of the project is a roadmap indicating the way and conditions for achieving and utilizing the identified best practices.
In accordance with the adopted approach, the KOMODA project defines a forward-looking vision of an open, interoperable, international e-Logistics system. Work on the project began with an analysis of supply chain needs (with the involvement of freight industry representatives) and comparing them with new organizational assumptions derived from science and research projects. The identified gaps/discrepancies between these areas were confronted with various types of opportunities and threats existing in this sector.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2009.