To strengthen the competitiveness of freight railways in the face of growing
intermodal competition, a joint data platform—
the Rail Freight Data Hub—is to be launched. Oliver
Wolff, VDV’s chief executive officer, announced this during the 2020 VDV Digital Annual Conference:
“Rail freight transport is ideally suited for greater
standardization and digitization. Currently, the industry
is not fully realizing its potential, and we have a heterogeneous state of
the art: Some companies have fully digitized their processes and
made them machine-readable, while others still rely on manual procedures. In
other sectors of the economy, shipment tracking and
reliable arrival forecasts are standard. Our goal is to
improve service quality, accelerate processes, and
minimize the error rate.” The platform is supported by companies
and is intended to be available for use across the industry. The VDV is now working with
its rail freight member companies to create the conditions
necessary to establish, in the next phase, a company that
will drive this initiative forward.
The rail freight industry currently lacks a
common data platform to make processes more efficient and, ultimately,
more customer-friendly. Numerous applications and data streams
are not interconnected or standardized. Wolff: “In addition to
higher quality, the financial aspect is significant: So far in the
project, we have optimized four of about 30 use cases. As a result,
based on a conservative estimate, these four improvements alone
would save us 27 million euros, meaning we would have
more than recouped the costs by the second year. So it’s also worth it from an economic standpoint. We
can become significantly more efficient through a holistic approach to coordinated
business processes and the use of data pools—
which will also be noticeable to our customers.”
Successful preliminary project enters its final phase
The project has been underway for some time within the VDV committees:
“But in the end, the companies themselves will
support and shape the platform. The platform is intended to be open to all companies,
as we are explicitly aiming for an industry-wide solution,” said
Wolff. This was preceded by a pilot project that identified the numerous
interfaces in the transportation process, prioritized exemplary
use cases, and ran through optimized scenarios. “The industry
has a lot of catching up to do digitally, and this process has begun. There is much to
do. In the coming months, we will, among other things, work out all
functional requirements and processes and develop the business model
with the goal of subsequently founding the company,”
Wolff concluded. To this end, funding from the federal government
will also be sought.