Thursday, February 19th, 2015
At Wednesday February 11 the first annual conference of ETP Alice was held in The Netherlands and hosted by Schiphol Cargo. Some 100 people, members and interested parties from all over Europe attended to discuss the potential of innovation to design the future of Logistics in Europe.
The conference started with a guided tour to Flora Holland the largest flower auction of Europe.
Ralph Keck, Chairman of Alice and Director Product Supply P&G, reviewed the first year of Alice in his speech and shared the latest innovation projects and results of P&G on Logistics with the audience.
He introduced the research and Innovation roadmaps and showed a short video on the link between the Alice roadmaps and the Physical Internet. He also explained how P&G projects are driving change towards implementation of these roadmaps. The Core project, in which P&G aims to provide a cheap and sustainable solution to control temperature during transport making the supply chain more resilient. Tina, an intermodal network to reduce both cost and CO2 emissions making better use of rail freight. And CO3 on cross chain horizontal collaboration, again to reduce CO2 and costs by increasing vehicle load factors.
> Watch video Physical Internet
Keir Fitch, head of Unit DG MOVE of the European Commission elaborated in his speech on the challenges and ambitions of Europe and the contribution of the Logistics sector end ETP Alice to those goals via the Horizon 2020 research agenda.
In his speech on “Logistics, Supply Chain Management and Advanced Manufacturing in Europe” Thorsten Hülsmann, CEO EffizienzCluster LogistikRuhr, discussed the ‘renaissance of manufacturing’ and a global competition of value creation and its effects on logistics and vice versa. The need for new flexible processes, IT and technology, big data and data sharing.
As Chairman of the Horizon 2020 Transport Advisory Group, Professor Allan McKinnon (Kuehne Logistics University), helps shaping the Horizon2020 research agenda on Logistics. In his presentation he stressed the urgency of revising the research agenda for the second phase of Horizon2020. More of the same will not be enough. Otherwise the very high, but necessary ambitions of Europe on sustainability will never be met. There are important new developments that need attention and may end in good opportunities such as the Physical Internet to overcome current and future challenges.
Professor Eric Ballot (Ecole des Mines ParisTech) and one of the founding fathers of “The Physical Internet”, discussed the ins and outs of this new concept. The concept of the Physical Internet is high on the agenda of ETP Alice [link to animation] as a means to a sustainable growth of the logistics sector.
> Watch video Physical Internet
Enno Osinga (senior vice president Schiphol Cargo), and host of the conference shared in his presentation the forces and constraints of air cargo growth. The challenges air cargo has to confront and the latest innovations of Schiphol Cargo like E-freight (paperless transport) and Smart Gate on security and safety.
Katrin Zeller presented DHL’s Trend Research and how DHL make use of this tool to prioritize short term proof of concepts to explore impact of potential innovations such as autonomous logistics (drones), 3D printing, Big Data or Augmented Reality. Katrin explained the process and proof of concepts for augmented reality and how this may impact near future DHL operations.