RAILVIS.com presented at RAILTALKS talkshow in Berlin their vision of the SMART ASSETS' future. RAILVIS.com managing partner Ctirad Klimánek explains how to work with data on the railway.
"Smart Assets for me denotes that every wagon is expected to be equipped with GPS and connected to an IoT system. This means that the data are transferred to the software, which processes the data further and there is all the information about the wagons or locomotives: where they are, what condition they are in, and whether the wagons are loaded or empty," Klimánek describes. "And just in conjunction with RAILVIS.com, this would help us not have to process this data manually - which is what is happening now - but to have it automatically transferred already to our platform," he added. Then their platform RAILVIS.com could inform the European market about available capacity, available locomotives or available wagons.
Participants of the RAILTALKS event also outlined the development of SMART ASSETS within the near future.
"I am convinced that in ten years, thanks to our platform or other platforms, Europe will be completely interconnected, all information will be processed in one list, everything will be available and can be ordered with a few clicks, and all railway companies will cooperate across Europe," Klimánek presented his vision. "It is a big challenge for us, but I am sure that in 2030, the platform will be an everyday affair, where you can ask for anything, offer anything, find all the options available and exploit the full potential of the European market," Klimánek concluded his speech.
Ctirad Klimánek started his career at ČD Cargo as a Sales Manager. After two years he moved to FORWARDIS in Berlin, where he worked as a Business Development Manager for almost four years. Between 2015 - 2021 he was Head of Rail Business in GEFCO. Since the beginning of 2021, he joined RAILVIS.com and RAILMARKET.com as a Managing Partner.
RAILVIS.com was launched in late 2020 and went live in 2021. It is a unique online platform for all organizational and administrative tasks related to rail freight transport.
RAILVIS.com currently has five basic functionalities. Namely, wagon hire, locomotive hire, wagon sales, locomotive sales, and locomotive performance sharing, which is a new feature that the company came to the market with this year. In terms of wagon hire, the supply now exceeds 2,300 wagons, and around 1,200 more are offered for sale. About 70 locomotives are offered for lease and about 40 for sale.
As for the locomotive capacity offer, which the company launched in January, there are already around seven locomotive capacities available each week. The demand for this service came directly from the market; the carriers themselves lacked something like this. Capacity sharing is now purely for freight transport. However, there is also potential for passenger transport.
All of these functionalities are based on the fact that the supply and demand of many companies are pooled in one place, which allows quick orientation and also gives the possibility to negotiate a much better price than could be achieved by communicating with only a few partners.
