Supply Chain Frontiers issue #43
Risk management, sustainability, safety, and security are hot supply chain topics. The Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC), Zaragoza, Spain, is participating in four European projects funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Program in these key areas.
The main strategic goal of the CASSANDRA project (Common Assessment and Analysis of Risk in global supply chains) is to enhance supply chain visibility in order to simultaneously improve business operations and the efficiency and effectiveness of government security inspections. From a business perspective the project will reduce administrative and planning errors along the chain. The payback for government agencies will be a new approach to risk assessment. The three-year project involves 26 partners from 9 countries, and has a total budget of 15 million euro ($ 21 million at current prices).
In Europe trucks carry on average only 57% of their cargo capacity by weight, and 27% of vehicles run with no cargo. A project called CO3 – Collaboration Concepts for Co-modality – is designed to increase truck load factors, reduce empty movements, and promote co-modality. This is achieved by enabling trading partners to share vehicle capacity. More efficient truck transportation also reduces greenhouse gas emissions. The CO3 consortium has 18 partners including logistics specialists, manufacturers, and transportation service providers from seven EU countries. The three-year project will build on existing methodologies to develop legal and operational frameworks for freight flow bundling in Europe.
The third project, called SoCool@EU, is described in the June 2011 issue of Frontiers (see the article titled Collaborating in Clusters). It aims to create an open platform in the European Union for research-driven regional clusters.
Last but not least, ZLC is involved in the SAFEPOST initiative (Integrated European Project Reuse and development of Security Knowledge assets for International Postal supply chains). The participants are European postal services such as the Spanish postal company, Correos. The objective of the project is to raise the level of postal security by integrating state-of-the-art screening solutions with postal operations and criminal and customs intelligence in a Europe-wide network. SAFEPOST will employ an innovative combination of techniques including new scanning technology, logistics optimization, image processing/recognition, and cross-border/cross-organization information sharing frameworks. SAFEPOST is a four-year project and expected to start in early 2012.
For more information on these projects contact ZLC’s Marketing Manager Cristina Tabuenca. Also, look for articles on these projects in future issues of Frontiers.