The need to minimize the carbon footprint in road transportation
The road transport activity of companies is a particularly complex one as it is necessary both for the supply and for the sale of the products.
Until now, the optimization possibilities aimed at reducing the general transport costs, and this is related to the vehicles used, the transport routes as well as the degree of loading of the vehicles both on the outbound route and on the return route.
Transport activity generates many records, and this requires appropriate hardware and software IT systems. Along with technological evolution, computer systems contributed more and more to the optimization of transport costs, either by optimizing the routes, optimizing the degree of loading of the means of transport, or both, but this was not enough.
Practice has proven that other parameters must also be considered, such as contractual conditions of delivery, or the urgency of delivery, a situation in which the one who places the transport order is no longer relevant, only the optimization of costs, the optimization of delivery times becoming equally important. Also, for the carrier, the parking times and the waiting times for loading and unloading are also important.
On the market, there is a large number of software applications for the field of road transport, which have developed facilities specific to a certain field of activity depending on the type of clients. Thus, there are transport management applications intended for production companies, in which case a better integration with the ERP system of the company is necessary, there are transport management applications for transporters, which aim to record transports by routes, by means of transport, per customer, etc., or applications for shipping companies, which are primarily interested in the lowest possible cost per km in order to be able to sell their service further with an additional higher commission.
For companies, and especially for large ones, it has become important not only to optimize transport costs at the organizational level but also at the level of the supply or sales chain. In certain situations, the presence on a certain market may be more important, even if the transport costs are higher, and in such situations, the optimization is thought at the organizational level and not at the geographical level.
Companies are already familiar with such tools, and their change generates a financial and IT shock for the organization in terms of the cost of purchasing the IT system as well as in terms of its implementation. From this point of view, we consider that for a company, respectively for the people in the respective company, it is easier to use new functions of a familiar application than to migrate to a new application.
The EU Regulation 2020/1056 regarding Electronic freight transport information (eFTI) and EU Directive 2022/2464 regarding corporate social reporting (CSRD) are relatively new and have been too little popularized, therefore companies, especially small and medium-sized ones, do not know about the obligation to introduce them starting with the year 2026. There are already two precedents with the implementation of the SAF-T systems and eInvoice, which have generated large imbalances both in the activity of companies, including IT solution providers, as well as in the activity of the authorities. We believe that a similar situation will occur from the moment of the introduction of mandatory CSR reporting. At the same time, a new way of optimizing road transport by minimizing the carbon footprint will appear.