Creating a modern market for rail freight services through task division

With the growth of trade, and consequently the development of individual transport sectors, their specialization increased. This led to the emergence of a properly prepared transport intermediary who, acting on commission, handled activities related to the shipment of goods without performing the transport operation itself. In organizing transport, they must work very closely with the transport company. At this point, it is necessary to define the freight forwarder and their role in the transport process. The freight forwarder concludes transport contracts and contracts for the performance of “ancillary” transport activities in their own name, but for the account of their principal, charging a margin specified in the contract for the service. In Poland, the “Civil Code” act formulates the definition of a forwarding contract, which states (Art. 794 of the Civil Code) that the subject of this contract is: sending a shipment, receiving it, and performing other services related to the transport of the shipment.

This seemingly short and general description of the forwarding service, after careful analysis, actually proves that the scope of forwarding services is very broad. With the development of information technology, freight forwarding is beginning to play an increasingly important role as a link connecting individual elements of the transport process. The basic service of forwarding companies is organizing the transport of goods domestically and internationally, and their area of operation includes road, rail, maritime, inland waterway, air, and intermodal transport. Organizing transport involves finding clients, determining transport details, negotiating the price for the service, and settling the service. The structures of a well-organized forwarding company should enable the acquisition of new clients for the transport companies with which the forwarder cooperates. This is a very important issue in a period of intensified competition between individual transport sectors. Following significant changes in the rail freight market in our country, which was certainly its opening to private companies, it is a very important issue for a rail carrier to have a well-organized service sales network. Full liberalization (76 companies already hold licenses for freight transport) and a change in the approach of clients to owning their own transport infrastructure (for example, railway sidings, transshipment terminals, which generate relatively high maintenance costs) have contributed to the creation of new, different external conditions.

To retain existing clients and acquire new ones, it becomes necessary to incur the necessary expenditures for the creation and subsequent maintenance costs of logistics infrastructure by logistics operators. Before the political and economic changes, rail transport in our country played a key role in the transport services market, and its share in some regions exceeded 60% (this was the situation in Silesia).
During this period, road transport was not perceived as a significant competitor to rail. The technique and technology of moving cargo and the quality level of this process were relatively low. However, with technical, technological, and economic development, a new division of the transport market was formed. Organizational and technical progress, covering cargo flow processes, has simultaneously changed the place and importance of the freight transport function in logistics. Its importance is still significant, but due to new production technologies, other elements of the chain have begun to play an important role, such as information flow, proper storage of goods, and delivering them on time to the designated place, etc. Thus, various factors influenced the change in the shape of the transport market. They can be reduced to a few key ones, for example:

• socio-political conditions (not excluding armed conflicts)
• technical and technological progress, changing the structure of demand for raw materials and the form of final products
• economic development in individual regions of the world and the associated changes in the international division of labor
• increase in client awareness regarding logistics.

Transport companies wishing to remain in the TSL (Transport-Spedition-Logistics) services market must expand their operations and cannot focus solely on their core business, which is transport, because the modern freight client expects a comprehensive service performed at an appropriate quality level.

The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 6/2008.