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“If you have to deliver between one and two million parcels per day, you need prediction models.”
PostNL has four guiding principles in its sustainability transition: CO2 reduction, livability, transparency and transformation, together with both customers and colleagues. Rogier Havelaar, who is responsible for sustainability at PostNL’s largest business unit, identifies three logistics trends: urbanization, new customer demands and data. The company has already been innovating at the intersection between sustainability and business for some time now: “Our targets are aligned with the provisions enshrined in the Paris Agreement; the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) has officially established this. We also stated last year that we wanted to accelerate our greening process, and we are investing an additional 80 million euros for that purpose.”
Interview with Rogier Havelaar, Head of Sustainability Parcels & Logistics
March 16, 2022
Will AI take over our jobs? Perhaps even take over the world? And what about malicious intent? There are all kinds of myths surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI). With extensive focus on such issues, little attention is being devoted to the opportunities that algorithms and AI offer us. There are opportunities all around us, even for solving complex (social) issues. Yet... these opportunities need to be identified and tackled. What (hidden) opportunities are out there? What are the myths? And are these myths also risks? In this first part out of two, we take a closer look at the opportunities presented by AI.
A conversation with Gerrit Timmer, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer (CSO) at ORTEC
Automotive manufacturers have idled production, beverage producers are faced with glass bottle shortages, and demand for paper has been vastly outstripping supply. All this is compounded by acute staff shortages across a variety of industries. Is there any way of avoiding these types of problems in the future? “There’s no reason to stop using global supply chains altogether, unless you’re considering environmental factors. But we must do a better job in identifying bottlenecks and make the system less prone to vulnerabilities, so as to ensure that potential disruptions have a less detrimental impact.”
Interview with Gerrit Timmer, co-founder and Chief Science Officer (CSO) at ORTEC
Transportation and supply chain managers are facing a complex challenge: can they start transitioning to zero-emission mobility at a reasonable cost, without impacting daily operations? It’s an issue they can no longer postpone.
Supporting our customers in the transition to e-mobility is an important strategic topic for ORTEC. It’s an area where we can have a lot of positive impact and live up to ORTEC’s mission: Improving the world using our passion for mathematics. To engage with our customers on this topic and help them embark on this journey, we are publishing a series of articles. In this first article, we share our vision on how mathematics and data can accelerate the transition to e-mobility. We also explain how an explorative innovation workshop enables you to get internal alignment and identify which challenges are worth solving first.
Scarcity seems to be everywhere: employees, raw materials, containers, computer chips, production capacity - all of these are scarce. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted global supply chains for the past two years. Experts don’t expect stability to set in until 2024.
How can data and advanced analytics techniques, like AI/ML and optimization, help us deal with scarcity? What is the added value of sharing data in the supply chain?
Interview with Goos Kant, Managing Partner at ORTEC and professor of Logistics Optimization at Tilburg University & Jheronimus Academy of Data Science. This is a complementary article to A Positive View on Workforce in Times of Scarcity.
On April 7th ORTEC hosted the Global Parcel Delivery webinar: How to engage my parcel delivery drivers using optimization?
Are you in the postal, parcel and express business? Watch this webinar and learn about the latest trends in parcel delivery, and how optimization can help to engage your parcel delivery drivers!
ORTEC Global Parcel Delivery Webinar 2022
This webinar took place on April 7th, 2022. You can watch the webinar below.
ORTEC, University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Dimitris Bertsimas of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launch Analytics for a Better World Institute (ABW), an initiative that brings together the brightest minds to pursue a special mission: applying analytics together with NGOs, the public sector, and non-profit organizations to make an impact on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Many organizations use SAP ERP to manage replenishment and customer orders. Typically, they extend SAP ERP with SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO) for forecasting purposes, and SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM) to plan freight units and freight orders. Often, they also use the Transport Load Builder (TLB) module (part of APO), which builds transportation loads based on pre-defined parameters such as weight and volume.
By Dick Zijlstra, Director of Value Realization and Senior Account Manager at ORTEC
Driven by our belief in the role technology and mathematics can play in addressing broader societal challenges, ORTEC signs the Microsoft Partner Pledge. The Microsoft Partner Pledge is a statement of intent in which Microsoft and partners start the movement to use tech as a force for good.
Zoetermeer, 6 December 2021 – ORTEC is awarded with a new gold medal by EcoVadis, an independent sustainability rating agency that assesses over 75,000 companies worldwide. In this new assessment ORTEC scores as high as in previous assessments – maintaining our gold rating.