Rail Freight Meetings in spotlight at SITL Paris 2015
With workshops, a showroom and work areas across a space of 300 m², the Rail Freight Meetings will constitute one of the key innovations at SITL Paris 2015, which will be taking place from 31 March to 2 April in Paris (France). Innovative players such as Herta France, SNCF Freight and Agenia are looking forward to this key event.
- (1888PressRelease) February 10, 2015 - Under the aegis of France's Secretary of State for Transport, the Rail Freight Meetings reflect the measures entrusted to the Association of Freight Transport Users (or AUTF, in French) following the ministerial conferences held with respect to the revival of rail freight in France.
The aim is to have a business dialogue at the service of growth in the rail industry, and, more particularly, to match supply and demand in the field of rail freight and combined road-rail transport by means of business meetings between shippers and all those involved in the rail-industry value chain.
The three case studies below illustrate the scope and interest of the Rail Freight Meetings due to take place at SITL Paris 2015, from 31 March to 2 April of this year.
CASE STUDY 1: HERTA FRANCE
"We would like to use rail freight and combined road-rail but we do not find that the shoe fits," says Marc Bernard, Transport & Supply Chain Projects Manager for Herta France - a comment which reflects the difficulty faced by shippers when evaluating current rail and multimodal offerings.
"Traffic volumes and the will to deploy these alternative solutions exist," points out Christian Rose, Executive Officer at AUTF, who bases his comment on an audit carried out among purchasing managers. "Though they lack visibility in terms of capacity and rail operations, compared to the very dynamic road possibilities."
A subsidiary of the Nestlé Group, Herta France operates factories in Arras (northern France) and Strasbourg (eastern France) that process 95,000 tonnes of food products per year. Using controlled-temperature storage, the goods are sent daily to two logistical hubs - one located in Ile-de-France (i.e. the Paris Region) and the other in the Lyons region - before being sent on to supply the retail trade.
"This just-in-time logistics process, today, is done 100% by road. On the Arras-Lyons link, for example, we use up to 12 refrigerated trucks per day," laments Marc Bernard. From the agricultural producer through to the consumer, Herta France's Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) targets mean, in practice, that the company must actively seek sustainable organisations that reduce its carbon footprint in relation to all the links in its supply chain.
"Implemented in the choice of raw materials, production methodology, packaging, etc., our social-responsibility plan also covers our out-bound logistics. This is the reason why we are looking for rail and multimodal solutions linked to our retail clients," explains Marc Bernard.
With this aim in mind, Herta France will be at the Rail Freight Meetings: "This event is a time-benefit accelerator, which will help us to achieve our ambition to lower our distribution carbon footprint. Herta wants to use rail and combined freight," says Marc Bernard, who has high expectations of the trade show.
At the Rail Freight Meetings, the manufacturer hopes to better understand how the rail sector operates. "We want to develop links with the professionals who can best respond to our logistics needs right through to the final customer, and also discover all the available multimodal innovations," explains Marc Bernard.
CASE STUDY 2: SNCF FREIGHT
Rail services have evolved over the last decade and have, in many ways, been revitalised. "Deregulation has put the clients and their requirements at the heart of the issue. Competition and the effects of the [financial] crisis have led to a rethink of the service and internal organisation of SNCF Freight," says Olivier Juban, Director of SNCF, the State-owned French railway operator.
It is in this context that the Rail Freight Meetings are an excellent occasion for SNCF Freight to meet procurement managers in order to explain current industry developments and, also, how the railway sector can respond to logistics challenges.
Shared services, Multi-Lots/Multi-Clients options, long trains, combined rail-road initiatives, and 'rail highways' are various aspects of the range of solutions developed by SNCF Freight, which demonstrate the company's efficiency and relevance. "Driven by teams managing production and sales, the solutions are configured to respond to the complex logistics challenge from purchasers within a framework of sustainable collaboration," explains Olivier Juban.
CASE STUDY 3: AGENIA
Agenia is a subsidiary of NGE, a multi-expertise group in the field of public works with a turnover of €1.5 billion. Agenia works with shippers, local communities and logistics hubs in order to develop sound rail-transport links and multimodal solutions.
"The expertise of Agenia is wide-ranging: from the construction and management of rail infrastructure through to developing rail-freight offerings, and including the management of hubs and network maintenance," says Michel Colombié, CEO.
On this basis, Agenia is the partner of Moulins Communauté in order to develop jointly the LOGIPARC 03 rail centre, in Moulins (central France).
The logistics of a rail network go well beyond mere point-to-point traffic management. Indeed, Agenia's added-value proposition comes from its ability to interlink connected services: handling, door-to-door transport, rail-road combined transport, connections to inland networks as well as ports, and so on.
"These extended services that include the management of infrastructures are essential in order to guarantee a premium service quality which responds to the challenges of the modern supply chain. At LOGIPARC 03, Agenia has developed this offering in partnership with Transports Terrancle and Eurorail," explains Michel Colombié.
These are concrete examples of the potential offered by the pooling of rail-sector skills and multimodal complementarities - common themes of the Rail Freight Meetings at SITL Paris 2015, to be held in Paris (France) between 31 March and 2 April of this year.
About Reed Expositions
Reed Expositions is the French subsidiary of Reed Exhibitions, the world's leading event organiser. Reed Expositions organizes over 50 trade shows per year in France across a range of sectors including transport and logistics.
Reed Expositions will be organising Transport Next Generation 2015, a new event that will run concurrently with SITL Paris 2015, as well as Intralogistics Europe 2015. These events will take place from 31 March to 2 April 2015 in Hall 7.2 of the Paris Porte de Versailles Exhibition Centre, in the southeast of Paris (France).
For further information about this press release, you can contact Ms Silviane Dubail of SD COM on: +33 (0)6 07 53 53 43 (telephone) and sdubail ( @ ) sdcom dot fr (email) dot
For further information about Reed Expositions, please go to: http://www.reedexpo.fr
For further information about the different trade shows, please go to: http://www.sitl.eu/index.php?Lang=gb
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