The efficiency potential of ICT in haulier operations

•We provide the first overview of ICT in road transportation.•This is the first paper to make a large-scale quantitative assessment addressing time efficiency in road transport operations.•The contrast made between the different individual transport unit benefits and the system wide benefits has important implications for future research projects.•Results are presented from the European Commission's Logistics for Life Coordination Action.

What is the efficiency potential of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in haulier operations? Previous literature has focused on the aggregated level benefits that could be achieved once a large proportion of hauliers have introduced ICT in their trucks. In reality, hauliers are only ready to invest in technologies that generate business benefits, yet there is a gap in the literature regarding the linking of technology to the actual efficiency improvement of hauliers. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap and consider the potential of ICT to improve the activities in road freight transportation. The focus is on the individual driver, and the level of analysis is the truck and driver activities. We have chosen time as the primary measure of efficiency. We carried out three parallel research steps over a five-year period. The first was a literature review on the potential effects of using state-of-the-art ICT as an enabler of higher efficiency in road haulage operations. In the second step, detailed measurements of the hauliers’ daily activities were carried out in LTL transportation. In the third step, a framework was applied to match the compiled potential achievements of ICT with the detailed time measurements of drivers’ activities in order to present potential improvement on this basis. This paper presents a unique contribution to ICT in the haulier industry and provides extensive measurements of how time is actually spent in road haulage operations.