Ukraine is one of the world’s innovators in IT and is ahead of European countries in terms of digitalization of public and commercial services. However, digitalization is still bypassing such an important industry as rail freight logistics, Ekonomichna Pravda reports.
Outdated asset management technology and imperfect principles of rail transportation organization hinder the development of production in Ukraine and cause complications in the transportation process.
The key problems include the lack of real-time tracking of transportation by automated systems; the inability to plan the work of enterprises, forecast arrivals and departures, optimize the use of resources and rolling stock; and the lack of coordination between automated systems of different participants.
The cornerstone of the problem is that the technology for obtaining data and interacting with participants in the transportation process does not allow for the correct automatic use of information about the actual location and condition of rolling stock.
Because of this, logistics assets are only 20% of the time engaged in operations (loading, transportation, unloading), and 80% of the time they are idle waiting for either the next operation or a human command.
In terms of costs, this looks like this: two-thirds of the cost of logistics in Ukraine is not the cost of producing work, but the cost of maintaining assets and people who need time to make (not always rational) decisions.
