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Geodis
Challenges
The global logistics sector is undergoing rapid digital transformation to address challenges of traceability and end-to-end flow optimization. Major industry leaders are forcibly imposing their technological standards on as many players as possible amidst a struggle for control over logistics data globally, raising risks of hegemonic positions. This context threatens the sovereignty of smaller players and introduces significant geopolitical challenges related to the ability of certain countries to control and influence logistics flows for their own interests.
GEODIS, a key French logistics player, has been innovating for the past two years with a visionary project called the ‘Shared Data Language for All’. This initiative is both a meta-model for data and an open-source technological standard that allows every stakeholder, regardless of the technology they use, to automatically share and exploit logistics data within a supply ecosystem. At all times, logistics stakeholders will have visibility into goods, flows, and available logistics resources to reconfigure their operations in real-time, choosing the best partner within the ecosystem at that moment, moving away from a contractor-to-contractor logic.
Our approach
To accelerate the adoption of this standard and establish its open-source nature for the public good, GEODIS needed to have it supported by other stakeholders, particularly institutional ones. It was also essential to achieve adoption on a national scale, then European, and finally global.
We highlighted the operational performance, environmental performance, and sovereignty challenges that the project addressed, anticipating the business use cases that these new technical capabilities would enable. This work was conducted in collaboration with the CSOA, the logistics service of the Armed Forces, which had undertaken a similar project at its level to facilitate logistics operations.
We then collaborated with GEODIS teams to model the ecosystem of private and public stakeholders surrounding the challenges the project addressed. This modelling served as both a support for showcasing the societal dimension of the GEODIS project and as a tactical reflection base to create the necessary synergies for institutional support for the project on a larger scale. These efforts led to discussions with institutional actors such as the AIT (Transport Innovation Agency) and the DGITM (General Directorate of Infrastructure, Transport, and Mobility).
Benefits
The first key milestone for the project was to pass the internal validation steps. Projecting the business benefits for GEODIS and the use cases enabled by the project contributed to achieving this initial goal.
The Shared Data Language For All project then received funding under the 4th Future Investment Program.
The need for interoperability among logistics actors and the construction of a common data language to enable this interoperability is now understood by government entities. The project is thus included in the Data & Digital roadmap of the General Secretariat for Ecological Planning as a key initiative to accelerate the decarbonization of logistics.
