Sectorial Platform for Sustainability Reporting of Road Transportation Companies
January 17, 2024
We are Tania and Nicole (Italy), Konstantina (Greece), Cristina and Catalin (Romania), attending the Executive Master in Sustainability Transition Management 2023 cohort at Bologna Business School.
- Relevant sustainability reporting obligations for companies imposed by new legislations,
- SMEs are part of supply chains requiring compliance with sustainability standards (not to lose clients),
- SMEs don’t have adequate resources, knowledge and tools to comply,
- One of the most vulnerable industries, road Transportation.
- Data complexity & quality (different ways of measuring, data collection is voluntary, often incomplete),
- Subjectitvity in the S & G factors, could be biases, privacy & ethical issues,
- Reporting & changing regulatory landscape,
- Sustainability is in SMEs’ stategy, but not in the budget allocations because of its complexity.
- Understand the actual needs of the field,
- Support SMEs in their sustainability transition and contribute to creation of a more sustainable supply chain,
- Develop a software solution (either autonomous device or tool to be integrated in existing softwares used by road transportation companies).
Our VISION is to guide the transformation towards sustainability of road transportation activities.
Our MISSION is to support, measure and report on sustainability progress of road transportation companies through collaboration and engagement with stakeholders.
Establish the key data that road transportation companies must report on for sustainability compliance.
Develop a tool (allowing for data collection and reporting) which can function on its own or as add-on to existing software applications.
Perfom a pilot on an existing road transportation platform to analyse if our sustainability related tool could be incorporated.
Talk to one of us today about our project.
To contact us please use email team@imaginability.eco.
Abstract of the project
The logistics sector plays an important role in today’s globalized business environment, yet it also contributes to the world’s most pressing sustainability issues of environmental pressure and climate change. Transport accounts for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions in the EU. The transport sector therefore plays an essential role in the climate crisis. At the same time, energy efficiency helps to bring down costs, especially as CO2 prices continue to rise. While some transport companies are aiming at carbon neutrality, trendsetters are already striving to be carbon positive. In addition, the European regulatory framework is going to push the sector to sustainability reporting and to accelerate actions to meet 2050 carbon neutrality. At the same time companies in the sector face challenges and uncertainties that evolve due to the business environment’s dynamism and managerial expectations. The road transport sector consists of SMEs mainly, with less access and capacity in terms of resources, tools, and competence on sustainability topics. Moreover, these difficulties are also reflected in managerial activities, including reporting practices including sustainability one.
In addition, the transport management system’s digital transformation is ongoing. Digital technologies are playing an ever-increasing role in the system. Depending on how this will be managed, the effects may be very different: while digital technologies can bring immediate benefits like efficiency improvements in the sector, they can also have indirect effects that can be much harder to predict and can strongly reduce benefits for the environment — or even worsen the pressures. In parallel, a proliferation of IoT tool for sustainability reporting is observed in different sectors and supply chain including road transport one, resulting in a multi-IoT system in the same supply chain. This could generate low efficiency, higher cost and put an additional drop in sustainability reporting complexity and challenges.
Supporting and servicing the companies of road transportation sector to deal with the sustainability reporting challenges, is the central idea of this project: through a web-based platform the companies can easily integrate their transport data or TMS (Transport Management System), obtaining sustainability reporting in automatic way. The aim of project work is to understand if the idea meets road transport needs in term of sustainability reporting, through an inductive process, through interviews, involving companies of logistic sector. Finally, the project work proposes the business model proposition developed through the idea of sustainability reporting service and considering the research among stakeholders.