ELA Awards 2024: Behind the scenes (European Project of the Year Awards)

Logistics, and not just logistics, is currently facing a number of unprecedented challenges, and the future promises more of the same. But alongside the pressure to drastically reduce its environmental impact, there is an ever-increasing emphasis on reliability, cost, flexibility and working conditions for employees. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, it is very interesting to see how individual companies, and especially the biggest players, are coping with market developments. A kind of showcase for the creativity of Europe’s most active companies is the annual highlight of the European Logistics Association’s competition for the most successful European project, the ELA Awards. The format is similar to the European Champions League, with the winning projects from each national competition going through to the European final. And today, just a few days after the deadline for national winners to submit their projects for the European round of this year’s competition, we have an exclusive opportunity to look behind the curtain of this exceptional competition and try to understand what the authors of the eleven projects are betting on for the future.

The projects can be divided into three groups according to their nature. In the first group we find the projects of VelyVelo, Revolutionising Last-Mile Delivery with Eco-Responsible Fleet Solutions, and the logistics provider Hermes, Green Delivery Hamburg. While the first of these projects, located in the Moroccan metropolis, is based on the creation of a last-mile logistics system exclusively using a large fleet of electric bicycles and electric cargo tricycles, the Green Delivery Hamburg project is a solution based on the full electrification of a fleet of trucks and delivery vehicles, including the construction of its own charging infrastructure. Both projects thus aim to provide local zero-emission transport.

The second and largest group of projects are those that aim to achieve measurable sustainability goals using only their own resources by exploiting existing reserves, particularly in the efficiency of individual processes. While Portugal’s CTT has entered the competition with its Smart: An Iberian solution for e-commerce logistics project, presenting a change in the organisation system of the pre-last mile parcel procurement, with the aim of increasing the capacity and speed of the system in response to the sharp increase in goods in the e-commerce segment, the Spanish company Affinity Petcare is sending its TARRACO 22 project to the competition, focusing on sustainability through optimisation, closer cooperation between man and technology, process automation and the digitalisation of data flows. RABEN Logistics Czech, nominated to the European competition by the Czech Logistics Association, is entering the competition with its project RABEN EUROHUB ROKYCANY – Sustainable and efficient transport across Europe. This project, like the other one submitted by the Polish company ŽABKA POLSKA, entitled Modern logistics solutions for operational efficiency and sustainable development, shows a way to achieve a new level of efficiency and the associated sustainable reduction of environmental impact through the optimisation and automation of processes, combined with rigorous control of resource and waste management, the use of renewable energy sources and an emphasis on the quality of the working environment. Ireland’s BWG Foods entered a project in this year’s competition called the BWG Transport Decarbonisation Project, which, as the name suggests, aims to reduce the emissions burden of its own logistics system through a combination of process improvement and optimisation measures. “The greenest and most profitable energy is the energy you don’t use,” says the project’s introduction, and you can’t help but agree. A separate group within this category of projects are the French LA POSTE/SHIPPEO project Real-time visibility control tower and the Spanish USYNCRO project, entitled Cross company collaboration impulse in Supply Chain Management towards sustainability. While the Shippeo project considers optimisation through better visibility across the supply chain as the most effective, the USYNCRO solution paves the way for greater interoperability between public and private technology platforms, using technologies such as blockchain and elements of advanced AI to offer maximum security, reliability and agility in the transport of goods.

Finally, in the third group of projects, there are those that offer the possibility of solving an existing customer problem in a different way from the usual one. In particular, GRINBLU‘s iPallet project, nominated by the Slovenian Logistics Association, offers a solution using special steel pallets to consolidate, for example, beverage crates and marketing displays for retail chains from production to shelf.  The Austrian RAIL CARGO GROUP‘s project Shift2Rail – Booking of Rail and Multimodal Transports with Real-Time Visibility via the Transporeon Platform presents a solution for a fully automated road-to-rail transition across the entire supply chain.  In particular, the project focuses on better exploiting the synergies between long rail transports and the first and last mile on the road in a pan-European context.

At the moment, it is not important which projects will fight for a place on the proverbial box in Lake Bled, Slovenia, in October. Given the nature of the companies taking part in this year’s ELA Awards, it is safe to assume that all solutions are interesting, useful and inspiring to others. But what is most interesting is to discover how different the concepts are that these companies have developed independently. What I personally admire about most of them is their conviction that the path to sustainable business is first and foremost about identifying existing reserves and striving to do things better, more accurately, more transparently and without unnecessary mistakes. I am very pleased to see how many remarkable companies are not relying solely on external help or support, but want to base their further development on their own resources. Indeed, it seems that common sense continues to play an important role in the development of their strategies …

Mirek Rumler

Vice President

European Logistics Association