ENJOY A NEW COURSE: INTRODUCTION TO LOGISTICS (I)

The Grandma arrives to Sant Boi by public bus

WHEN?

Today, The Grandma has started a new course of Logistics in Sant Boi de Llobregat. It is always a pleasure to return to this beautiful city because she has great memories of it and its people.

The main reason of her returning has been to start a new course of Logistics. Sant Boi is placed in the Llobregat Delta and it is an important enclave near Barcelona Port and International Airport, two essential logistic areas.

Sant Boi is a city with an ancient history and an important and essential presence in the history of its neighbour Barcelona, all the Catalan countries particularly and the European southern cultures generally. It is very important to know the origins of the place that you are visiting because every place has a particular idiosyncracy that explains the character of its population and the historical events occurred there. The Grandma has explained a story about The Capuchin in Sant Boi.

More information: The Jones search their origins, don't they?

More information: The Order of Friars Capuchin in Sant Ramon, Sant Boi

WHO?

The Grandma has met their new partners -David, Fabio, Jéssica, Joan, Margot, Ricard and Víctor- and she has spent a wonderful day learning new concepts and methods with them thanks to their new Oxford Manuals about English for Logistics.

WHERE?

Today, they have been talking about the main concept of logistics and the importance of Barcelona in the logistics routes of European Union thanks to the Mediterranean Corridor (still unfinished and without an end-date) and the strategical situation of the city and its Metropolitan Area inside the Blue/Yellow Bananas, an economic and social term defined by Roger Brunet.

More information: Mediterranean Corridor & Rail Freight Corridor

The Blue Banana (also known as the European Megalopolis or the Liverpool–Milan Axis) is a discontinuous corridor of urbanisation spreading over Western and Central Europe, with a population of around 111 million. The concept was developed in 1989 by RECLUS, a group of French geographers managed by Roger Brunet.

The French geographer Roger Brunet, who observed a division between active and passive spaces, developed the concept of a West European backbone in 1989. He made reference to an urban corridor of industry and services stretching from northern England to northern Italy.

The name Blue Banana was dually coined by Jacques Chérèque, and an artist adding a graphic to an article by Josette Alia in Le Nouvel Observateur. The color blue referred to either the color of the flag of the European Community, or the blue collars of the factory workers in the region.

The Grandma & her new partners

Brunet saw the European Backbone as the development of historical precedents, e.g. trade routes, or as the consequence of an accumulation of industrial capital. In his analysis, Brunet excluded the Paris urban area and other French conurbations because of French economic insularity. His aim was a greater economic integration in Europe, but he felt that France had lost this connection by the 17th century as a result of its persecution of Huguenots and centralisation in Paris. Later versions do, however, include Paris.

In 1991, in the context of a study on behalf of the European Commission in support of its Regional Policy, researchers criticized the idea of the Blue Banana as a desirable formation, but not its empirical reality, identifying it as the result of regional competition in Europe. 

Furthermore, their diagram of the Blue Banana had more of a curve, still including Northern Italy, but ending at Barcelona. It also included Paris, and had the Anglo-Scottish border as its northern stem.

A study of the history of the Blue Banana as a concept refers to the Commission's study as a mistaken rejection of the Blue Banana from Brunet's original conception. From the research on the Commission's behalf, the Blue Banana represented a developed core at the expense of the periphery, whereas Brunet empirically viewed the Blue Banana as a region of development at Paris's periphery, beyond the French borders.

It stretches approximately from North Wales across Greater London to the Benelux states and along the German Rhineland, Southern Germany, Alsace in France in the west and Switzerland to Northern Italy in the south.

More information: Ski Rise Cities

WHAT?

Logistics is a fundamental part of supply chain management. It consists of the organisation and management of flows of goods related to purchasing, production, warehousing, distribution and the disposal, reuse and exchange of products, as well as the provision of added value services.

These days, enterprises often outsource their logistics activities to third party logistics providers and it is estimated that long-term contractual relationships, contract logistics, constitute 16% of total global logistics, while express/courier/parcel service are key to the e-commerce delivery business.

A recent study on the EU logistics market estimated that the logistics operations (excluding in-house operations) amount to €878 billion (2012) in the EU. According to the World Bank Connected to Compete logistics performance index, the EU logistics sector performs well on a global level, the global top largest logistics service providers are all based in Europe; six countries out of the global top-10 logistic performers are EU Member States. However, the performance varies across the Member States. While Germany has the world's highest ranking, the EU average is 3.56 (out of 5), with US at 3.92 and Japan at 3.91.

The Communication on the Freight Transport Logistics Action Plan 2007 established a list of activities to improve the framework for transport logistics operations in the EU. Discussions with stakeholders and the Logistics Conference 2013 identified that in the EU logistics costs represent about 10-15% of the final value of products. It is estimated that about half of these costs could be saved if obstacles were removed. These obstacles are in particular high administrative burden and inefficient transport chains, lack of transport infrastructure and the non-completion of the internal transport market.

More information: EU Freight Transport Logistics Action Plan

Areas specifically targeted are therefore:

-Administrative burden and in particular customs procedures continue to be raised by industry as one of the main barriers for cross-border transport -in particular for efficient and fast logistics. Digitalisation can facilitate administrative procedures through the establishment of so–called single windows and the implementation of the 'reporting-only-once' principle. These issues will be addressed in the recently launched Digital Transport and Logistics Forum (DTLF) .

David is filling a pallet with wood pieces

-As regards infrastructure, the new TEN-T framework has tripled its budget and focuses on transhipment facilities, missing links and the creation of a network of multimodal transport corridors allowing large volumes of freight to be moved efficiently.

-Transport services do not perform equally well in all modes and in all parts of the EU. Open and competitive markets tend to provide better and cheaper services and hence the completion of the Single European Transport Area remains a policy objective.

-The internalisation of external costs of all transport modes is a key topic. High negative externalities are also due to current transport patterns, where road is predominant with 70% of activity and more than 70% of the total negative externalities. The harmonisation of carbon footprint measurement will enable benchmarking of transport services as regards their environmental sustainability, while streamlining business processes and operations.

More information: Catalonia Logistics

Logistics supply chains cross from mode to mode. Advanced information and communication technologies contribute towards co-modality by improving infrastructure, traffic and fleet management and facilitating a better tracking and tracing of goods across the transport networks. For several ITS systems freight transport has become a pioneer market due to its smaller size and more consolidated organisation and ownership.

ITS technologies are essential for the introduction of eFreight , whereby en route information on the location and condition of transported goods (especially for dangerous goods and live animals) is made available online in a secure way. In the future this may lead to a concept of intelligent cargo, meaning that goods become self-, context- and location-aware as well as connected to a wide range of information services.

e-Freight also includes the vision of a paper-free, electronic flow of information associated to the physical flow of goods. A deployment strategy for ITS, incorporating navigation systems, digital tachographs and tolling systems, can contribute to change in the logistics chain.

The road mode is a principal mode for freight transport, both for bulk and manufactured goods. For Green Freight Corridors the combination of alternative fuel vehicles and intelligent transport systems for long-distance and multi-modal traffic will be important.

 More information: eFreight

To promote innovation, the Freight Transport Logistics Action Plan encourages the use of information and communication technologies in freight transport. It outlines the vision of paperless information flows accompanying the physical shipment of goods. It will also help make traffic management more efficient by promoting intelligent transport systems as well as facilitate the roll-out of innovative services. Emerging technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and the possibilities offered by satellite services will revolutionise freight transport.

Core services include tracking and tracing (especially dangerous goods and animal transports), fleet management, intelligent truck parking and remote freight information.

 More information: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

Logistics is a great maze if you are a starter in this materia. For this reason, The Grandma and her partners have decided to review their English Grammar and Vocabulary to help to improve their new logistic knowledge.

To do it, they have been playing Scattergories and Password; and they have been describing objects, people and places to practise their skills in vocabulary, especially adjectives and their syntactic order in the sentence.

Play on line: Password & Scattergories-I & II

More information: Order of Adjectives

Download Adjectives & Nationalities Cards

Being in the consumer business helps us groom talent

in areas like marketing, finance and logistics.

We can benchmark our outsourcing business

to our consumer business and its best practices.

Azim Premji