Success is about sharing. Where Baby Boomers and Gen Xers may have been educated to compete until monopoly, millennials have an approach that focuses much more on sharing, openness and collaboration. As this generation now enters adulthood, most of the population has used platforms like Uber or Airbnb (or at least knows other users).

Sharing is of special importance in the logistics industry, which is highly fragmented and produces a large share of the global CO2 footprint. Unfortunately, logistics is still far from efficient. In the European international road transport industry for example, the average load factor fluctuates between 40 and 45%. One of the main reasons is that transport contracts are usually still old-fashioned bilateral agreements between a logistics service provider and a purchasing department of the shipping company. This is like limiting yourself to only use a single hotel chain for all your travels in the coming years, and disregarding all alternatives on Airbnb or booking.com.

At Argusi we want to contribute to the sharing economy in transport and logistics. We apply our optimization tools to find, analyze and support collaboration projects in which companies share transport capacity, facilities, contracts, and expertise. We do matchmaking between shippers, host inspiration sessions, perform synergy calculations, and advise on gain sharing before and during collaboration projects.

Not one logistics collaboration project is identical to another. There is still quite some work to do to standardize logistics collaboration into a sharing platform like in the taxi or hotel industry. But there are promising developments in the market. We are convinced that the load factor will be much higher than the current 45%, and that sharing and collaboration will play a major role in this. Our team of Gen X, Y and Z is ready for it.