Secured trade lanes in the North Continent - Russia Corridor
1. Background and Challenges
This demo project addresses a number of issues related to logistics tendencies nowadays, and how integrated MoS corridors can be used to address them:
- Complex criss-cross flows of goods around the globe, caused by the global economy bring more and more participants into the supply chain;
- Reduced inventories and increased velocity of inventory presses hard to accelerate the cash-to-cash transport chain, causing such chains to become significantly more sensitive to disruption and interruption;
- This and other market tendencies require reduced lead time and lead time variability, reduced total landed costs, increased speed of trade/security compliance and administrative procedures on EU/Russian borders, end-to-end transport chain visibility, and rerouting of goods in transit;
A MoS corridor can play an important role to provide such high-performant transport chains. The challenge for this corridor is twofold:
1. Concentrating cargo flows on this corridor in order to enable frequent services as well as enough volume to sustain an operating infrastructure;
2. Providing a soft infrastructure that supplies the corridor with tools to make it accessible, to support the execution of efficient and flexible shipments on the corridor, to cope with administrative compliance issues etc.
The project will work from a baseline: Two potential cargo flows have been identified that could serve as baseline:
- First a flow provided through MSC Belgium. This will be further defined and made operational within the project. MSC Belgium has the ambition of developing new MoS based services from Flanders to Russia with the capability to attract traffic that is currently handled by road only. Seamless information flows and ease-of-use by MSC customers are basic conditions.
- Second a containerized flow from Toyota’s European Parts Centre in Flanders to Russia. The flow is being managed by SSL Spedition Services Limited, a specialist freight forwarder to Russia and all the former Soviet Republics. The flow is driven by the main short-sea link between Antwerp and Hamina as well as rail/road links further into Russia (a block train from Hamina to St. Petersburg has been started recently). SSL is not part of the project partnership but is willing to engage in a demonstration.
Through the involvement of the Flemish Institute of Logistics (VIL) and/or Alfaport Antwerp (the federation of port and logistics companies in Antwerp), further development of the corridor may take place, aimed at attracting and demonstrating additional cargo flows.
Another part of the baseline is formed by the components that are to be integrated into a soft infrastructure:
- Siemens electronic seals and reader infrastructure that are used to monitor location and security status of individual containers;
- The ICSO container status & tracking server, which provides a neutral platform for monitoring the security status of individual containers;
- The Logit D2D intermodal logistics execution platform, which enables a collaborative environment for transport operators, forwarders, and shippers to share information on intermodal shipments as well as shipment management tools;
- The Porthus integration platform, providing the mechanism to integrate the abovementioned components and provide interoperability to external systems of ports, operators, and authorities;
2. Objectives
The main objective for this work package are situated on several levels. On a general level we aim to:
- Demonstrate how a private sector initiative can develop a corridor in a bottom-up fashion;
- Optimize hinterland capabilities through intermodality;
- Interconnection of the North Sea region with the Baltic Sea region and Russia;
- Input as best practices and lessons learned for work package C (MoS development in hubs and hinterland) and D (Transport networks and corridors);
More specifically we aim to:
• Avoid inefficiencies in transit times arising from security requirements;
• Improve collaboration in as well as performance, flexibility and agility of logistics;
• Avoid multiple entry of identical data and further the single-window concept;
• Improve efficiency of administrative compliance;
• Integrate the IRU-TIR system into this intermodal corridor;
• Contribute to visibility and dynamic logistics chains;
The demonstration project realises a proof-of-concept implementation of this corridor, integrating an end-to-end transport chain management platform with full integration of trade compliance procedures, leading to an accessible, flexible and dynamic freight operation with reduced lead time and reduced variability (e.g. in lead time to cross the Russian borderline).
3. Outputs and Results
The output and results of this work package will be:
• A secured trade lane from the North Sea area to Russia (Moscow);
• Shipment management tools shared by the whole logistics community;
• Single-window approach (e.g. goods information);
• Electronic data exchange through the whole transport chain;
• Provisioning of real-time status information & in-transit tools;
• Accessibility and easy-to-use intermodal transport options;
And:
• Utilization of the ICSO (International Container Securty Organization) platform for container security monitoring to ease trade/security compliance procedures;
• Integration of a collaborative ICT platform for freight operations on this corridor;
• Deliver an implementation guideline for other MoS corridors based on the experiences developed in this demonstation;
• Improve the performance and accessibility of the demonstrated corridor;
